alt Hacker News$599 seems like a lot to me. You can get numerous older, much more powerful Mini PCs (e.g older ThinkCentre Tiny series) or even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini for that kind of money.
Admittedly, the 10G interfaces and fast RAM make up for some of it, but at least for a normal homelab setup, I can't think of an application needing RAM faster than even DDR3, especially at this power level.
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I just picked up a NAS - a ugreen dxp2800 - for £300. It has 2x nvme slots and 2x 3.5 bays. It’s x86 so if you don’t like the ugreen os you can change it.
It runs docker (supports docker compose) and vms and has the usual raid stuff.
They also do an arm version for half the price but I wanted the intel gpu for transcoding.
Not sure about the CPU performance being much more powerful for some shit-stained NUCs found on ebay, but one selling point for these minisforum machines are hassle-free dual 10G interfaces which are required for decent cluster performance - see ceph or proxmox ( with ceph ) or even kubernetes with, you guessed it - rook-ceph. Getting 10Gbit interface to work on ThinkCentre is possible, but not guaranteed to be reliable. This machine is perfect for such application and price point is not that terrible all things considered.
You can't get an ARM one though, only X86, which is mostly the point.
> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini
A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice).
Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all.
Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €1000 to €1719.