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.
Tbh, as someone who just built their own system I am a little bit angry that they didn’t announce it a few months earlier - I would have waited a bit longer then to see their pricing.
The specs are solid for a “Proxmox NAS with ZFS and containers”. For a regular NAS it’s oversized,but we all know that. The trend towards integrated devices is there and I went down that way as well.(And if you can actually install a different OS of course)
Anyway: If they can deliver what they promise it might be one of the most interesting systems - it doesn’t have many of the issues the Ugreens have (lack of ECC,etc.) and if they manage to deliver… it’s pushing into a space a lot of prosumers and small companies are that is currently only covered by self builds or spending much more money than necessary.