Thanks for these videos, they were a good watch and it was helpful to see a direct comparison. The AOOSTAR is pretty compelling, but I think I am still leaning to the N5 Air for several reasons. That full PICE slot gives a LOT of options, I like how easy it would be to service / clean, and I just don’t think I need that many drives… I could add more flash via the Oculink or other interfaces, and this will be stored in an area I don’t normally access, so the screen isn’t of any value to me. If I do something later to need a SFP port I could install a Intel NIC. I would rather have 10g copper as it’s a little more flexible for reasonable future expansion.
1 Like
Well, after sleeping on it a day or 2, I placed an order for the Minisforum N5 air. 520 delivered is pretty solid. My 48g stick of memory should be good for a bit. I also plan to replace the nvme with a bigger one. I’m pretty sure the factory one is a 2230, which to be perfect to slot into the rpi nvme hat I expect to buy soon haha. I’ll post some pics here when I get it in and loaded up with truenas, along with my thoughts from migrating from a Synology. I used to run a freenas server several years ago, so I’m not totally unfamiliar with the OS.
Thanks again to everyone that replied. It was great getting to see some options I forgot about or never knew existed. It was very helpful.
I’m thinking of spinning up a rpi5 with a nvme hat to host a local matrix node, if you have interest in me documenting that boondoggle for the forum please let me know!
1 Like