Guys I am really excited about the possibility of this little NAS and ones like it in 2024. The price and availability are supposed to be announced in mid January 2024: AOOSTAR WTR R7 PRO New DIY NAS Metal Shell Mini PC with 6 HDD bays, 6 – AOOSTAR Mini PC
Can you say vSAN host or Proxmox Ceph monster?
that looks neat. my first concern, though, is the pcie connectivity. the 5800U only has 16 pcie 3.0 lanes. given the supported device connectivity, that's nowhere near enough if you want something higher performance.
it's definitely a cool enclosure, but i'm not sure why they're releasing something in 2024 that is built on the 4-year old Zen3 with no pcie 4.0 support 🙁
if the price is right, it could be a good option for a NAS with basic container abilities.
@malcolm-r good observations on the specs. For this very reason, I have been holding out on switching over to full-on mini PCs for the lab as of yet. I am looking for DDR5 so we can get 96GB in this form factor, PCI-e 4.0 and hopefully as you mention a newer generation CPU. But I will say, it is exciting me to see some of these interesting hardware combinations. One thing I think is great, is 10 GbE connectivity and the number of NVMe and HDD in this space. Will be great to see how this form factor and product line from other vendors evolves over this next year.
This definitely looks promising but will all depend on the cost. Any guesses ? I'll bid $701 Bob.
@ghaleon I am with you. So far, I have seen no mention of cost with the unit. Will be interesting to see the price point. I am thinking this space will be heating up in 2024, with the Zimacube and others entering this space as well.
I've got that CPU in my desktop (Ace Magician mini) and it seems to do great, but it feels like an unbalanced choice for a NAS. Lots of compute, but as pointed out, limited connectivity. Kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from what 45 Drives chose for the HL15, which is low on compute with lots of connectivity.
@life-from-scratch definitely a limitation on the Aoostar with 16 PCIe 3 lanes. It looks like the Zima has PCIe 4 and maybe some better specs with the Kickstarter. For me the HL15 I think is going more in the direction of a traditional server, which is cool, but for me I am looking to downside footprint, power consumption, etc.
I'm surprised the Intel U300 CPU hasn't gotten more love. 1 P-core, 4 E-core, with 20 PCIe lanes at Gen4.
@life-from-scratch yeah one thing I don't like about the mini PC market is it seems like they are always behind the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel and AMD. Generally they are at least 2 generations behind. Not sure what is behind the slowness there. I'm with you the U300 looks decent at least on paper.
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