I understand this could be posted in a hardware forum or I could use a stats comparison tool (and I’ve poked around a fair bit as is), but I’m curious, specifically from the self-hosted, roll-your-own NAS perspective, does the Minisforum n5 Pro seem like a decent machine for self-hosting? Any impressions? What percebtage of this is the marketing hype-train and what percentage would still be good if it shipped unbranded in a cardboard box. What would you expect this to cost?
https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
Currently I’m running one of the DS-Series Synology NAS but I want to remove the Synology dependency because I don’t fully trust them to deliver and not remove features. I would rather give the TrueNaAS thing a try (or something in that direction) now so I’m prepared to jump ship when I need to. I’m lucky enough to be able to buy a decent NAS and hang onto it for a while, but I want to come in below the point where an extra $100 doesn’t really get me much anymore.
I am specifically interested in the hardware because I don’t plan to use the default OS.
I hate to say this but it’s gonna be expensive obviously compared to what you can get from China. Just look at the CPU - for a NAS, it’s a huge overkill. Aoostar WTR Pro looks identical for NAS storage needs and costs around 300 euros on AliExpress. I don’t see this thing being priced any lower than that
This seems more like a server with a built-in NAS, but i agree it’s probably way overkill for most, though it seems like an awesome product at first glance. It’s like they took every component and cranked it up to 11. I wish we saw more of this in the consumer electronics segment and less “let’s strip or nerf everything we possibly can before sales tank. Our margins are so great this quarter!”
It is complete overkill for most home server tasks but I would look to run something like this for next 10 years at least so I can see it making sense if you cost it out like that.