Hi, I just came across the video ‘Can we build a home server out of mini pcs’ and would like to give some of my opinions regarding the topic.
From my experience, I did not have a very good experience using mini pcs.
I had initially bought a Minisforum minipc running on the Intel Celeron(Gemini Lake) and was having issues with the distro(think it was manjaro) I was using, the mini-pc would continuously kernel panic upon boot after installation, and I had contacted their support and could not resolve the issue(well they were just googling the issue and giving me the same link I found which does not resolve the issue). I then promptly ask for a refund because I had spent too much time debugging the issue and would like to just purchase something else that works. Well, support probably blocked me because after that because my subsequent emails went unanswered. Upon checking their return policy on their website at that time, I realised they had written that returns are possible 7 DAYS AFTER PLACING ORDER. Checking the tracking for shipping, the package had spent exactly 7 days clearing customs in HK before being shipped out. Currently looking at their current site, they seemed to have changed it to 7 days from receiving. Not sure whether they will actually honor that or not, but nonetheless yet i would still caution when buying chinese mini pcs, either buy through Amazon where they have good return policies or use Paypal which usually have buyer protection or use credit cards where you can initiate a chargeback. Or even better, get something more reputable like Intel NUC. Also, consider the worst case when shit happens. Let’s say a reputable pc costs 100 bucks and a chinese one 75 bucks, you decide to save 25 bucks. if the chinese one craps out, you are out 75 and have to possibly order another one for 75 making your total cost of ownership 150 bucks, 50% more than you would have spent if you got a reputable one in the first place. Shit out of luck for me of about 130 bucks and I had learnt my lesson.
Also, I needed more storage and had to and decided to use an external multi-bay HDD enclosure to directly attach to my PC, instead of a NAS and settled for a cheap Ugreen 5 bay usb-c hdd enclosure(150 bucks I think). I had some old HDD lying around and decided to use the enclosure to first wipe them before setting up my new storage, and lo and behold, I was not able to ATA Secure Erase them because the controller did not forward ATA commands properly. I was also unable to access S.M.A.R.T. data using CrystalDiskInfo. It was a blessing that I had came upon this issue before I had committed to using it for my new storage. I think much care should be taken when deciding to use a usb-hdd enclosure, especially since most of these enclosures do not mention what controller is being used and whether they support ATA commands properly.
Also, with regards to ZFS. This is only one of the issues I have personally encountered and I do not know if there are any other issues when using usb-sata enclosures. Even if the usb-hdd enclosure relays proper ATA commands and smart data, there is also the possibility that it uses sata multiplexers, whereby they are connecting multiple sata ports to 1 sata lane. Client workloads may be fine, but if you are using ZFS and you are transferring data at max capacity(especially when ZFS is scrubbing), multiple hdds will quicky saturate 1 sata lane and unexpected errors might occur. This is also the reason why over at the truenas forum, there is such a strong opinion over unsupported hardware configurations because such unforseen circumstances will not show up in initial testing because data will read and write fine.
The issue here seems to stem from commercial choices from Minisforum, rather than from the idea of using a MiniPC.
Regarding the use of USB enclosures, which is something I’m considering for the future, one of the issues stressed in the video was the fact that only now good enclosures with quality / higher-end components are starting to become available.
A deeper dive / series of comparisons on this latter issue would be extremely welcome indeed.
I have an enclosure just like this one, sold by RaidSonic / ICY BOX, using the JMicron JMS562 (5 Gbps, but with eSATA). The 10 Gbps version sold for ~50 EUR more seems to be using a VIA VL820 (4-way 10 Gbps USB hub) and 4 VIA VL715 USB to SATA bridge controllers (thanks for putting that in the spec sheet, RaidSonic). Hacky, but probably means you can see individual serial numbers. I’d imagine it’s a similar setup here.
If it’s crashing all the time that’s just a problem with your specific hardware. And it’s true that you can get a higher quality USB enclosure these days which should behave better. So it should be possible to do this successfully.
But honestly I wonder what the point is? Used SFF (not Tiny/Mini/Micro) business machines are dirt cheap, efficient enough (external HDDs will bring a mini PC up to similar power consumption), and you can install 2 HDDs plus a 2.5" SSD, PCIe cards for network or NVMe storage, and sometimes m.2 NVMe natively. No external power brick, no power bricks or cables for the HDD enclosures, it’s just such a clean and cheap solution to this problem compared to a smaller PC. Sure, that mini PC has a modern low power CPU that’s very fast or very efficient or both, but the whole package just isn’t that affordable or convenient compared to a slightly larger PC that doesn’t need external storage
