I’m really interested in buying this machine, but I think I need a sanity check. From the “Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?” video, I pretty much want to do that—Mini PC with DAS to use a home server. Right now, I am using a Mac Mini M1 16GB with an external 18TB USB hard drive.
Then I watched the video on the Asustor Xpanstor 4 AS5004U and figured that would be the better option for the DAS than the Mediasonic unit. After watching some videos on the MS-01, it seems like it would be a better homelab machine than the NAB6 that Wendell recommended before. I like that there are more options for future expansion.
So I’m thinking a combination of the MS-01 and AS5004U would be a pretty beefy home server for virtualization, hosting Plex, a home file server, backups, and learning and testing in a lab environment. But now I am having trouble deciding between the 13900H and the 12900H CPU. I’m leaning toward the 12900H to save the money, but this limits the maximum RAM capacity from 96GB to 64GB. I don’t think this is going to make a huge difference for my (relatively tame) usage.
Regardless of the CPU, I plan on only buying one NVMe SSD and one SODIMM at the beginning for cost savings, then upgrade down the line.
I think the MS-01 with DAS is the perfect combo for a mini PC home server! The value it brings along with its connectivity is hard to beat.
I have 5 of them. If I had to do it again - I would buy something else (rack mounted, pizza box, SuperMicro somethings). My setup is very different (Proxmox HA/HCI Ceph) than your idea however. While setting my systems up, I thought a single MS-01, w/ DAS, stood out as the best option for the MS-01. It seems like it was made for that role.
I would get the 12900H CPU - the 13900H seems to have some issues. The savings, and your use case, make it the better choice in my opinion. Also, the 12900H works just fine with 96GB of RAM 
I will say, that I think you should pick if it is a:
- Home server for shared files, virtualization, hosting Plex, learning and testing.
or
- For backups.
Might want to get two MS-01 and AS5004U?
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Thanks for the reply! I can’t really afford two machines at the moment (for your point about backups), but I will definitely consider that in the future. I suppose an option for now would be to use cloud backup solutions for the most important data. I have a Proton Drive subscription already so that gives me 500GB to play with there.
You can save even more getting the 12500H barebones - should start shipping in a couple weeks. Less cores but same RAM/PCIe Lanes though…
It’s about $440ish?
I remember Onedrive 1tb being super cheap too… $6ish a month w/ exchange, sharepoint, teams, more and online office? Check out Business basic.
Backblaze is decent too.
Hetzner.com though … $3.43 for 1TB is probably the best.
One of:
External Docking Bay
Two of :
1TB HDD
Is $73 For 1TB in RAID 1 for local backs attached to a PC - any PC.