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Lantorax
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2025
I got the I-5 and did upgrade it to 96GB of RAM.This thing has been solid. The fiber NICs work flawlessly, so does the copper ethernet.Running a fairly bare-bones Arch Linux hypervisor on it, which runs some of my home services. Not had any issues in the year or so since I've gotten it. Highly recommended.
Steve
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2025
This thing puts out a TON of heat, even when it's idle. I installed a half-height controller card that came with my 8-bay SAS/SATA enclosure. Even when there are no VMs running, and just maintaining a low-use 3-node Ceph cluster, it's just billowing out heat from the vents. I suppose it's not a huge issue, but in my eyes that means it could use better cooling and/or a larger enclosure.That being said, I would definitely buy more of these in the future if I want to expand my cluster, or one of my other PC-based servers dies a horrible death. I upgraded to 96GB of RAM, and you can also daisy-chain 3 of these via thunderbolt and have a wicked-fast internal network for heartbeat, Ceph, and live migrations. Then you can use the 20+ Gbps of networking for everything else.
ECD
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2025
I absolutely loved this as a homelab machine when it was working, it's a very capable server computer in a very small footprint. The problem was that one of the 10G network ports started malfunctioning. I contacted Minisforum support, went through the troubleshooting steps with them, and they determined that they would send me a replacement after receiving the defective unit. I sent the unit back per their instructions, and never received a message in response, after many messages over several weeks requesting status. I am now out $700 for a computer I returned on the assurance it would be replaced.If you get one, just hope it never breaks.
René Bonvanie
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2025
I am a Mac person through and through but have a few workloads that don’t work well in Parallels, so I started looking for a minimalistic approach that didn’t require me to buy an expensive laptop or bulky desktop. I found great articles about the Minisforum MS-01 and was impressed with its upgradable design, size, and performance characteristics. I bought the largest model and got a 4Tb NMVe SSD and a Yeston RTX 3050 low-profile GPU as upgrades.The PC was super easy to set up. I first cloned the 1Tb SSD to the 4Tb SSD and installed it without any problem by removing just 3 screws. The video card was even easier to install as it required a single screw to be removed. I connected the PC to my 10Gbps network using an SFP+ fiber adapter and was off to the races. The boot time was super fast and after a few obligatory Windows installation steps, I was up and running, connected to the internet, and had a great 4K image. I was glad to see it came with a Windows 11 Pro license and absolutely zero apps; just the necessary drivers.The forums mentioned that upgrading the BIOS was important and that was easy too, although that entire process was much better explained on the forums than in the Minisforum documentation. It took just 5 minutes in the end and allowed me to see a lot of interesting features in the BIOS as well.Now that I’ve run the system for a week, I’m so impressed. It’s unbelievable how powerful this minuscule PC is and how easy it was to expand. It’s not as quiet as my Mac Studio Pro, but it’s totally fine from a noise perspective.I highly recommend the Minisforum MS-01.
B+
Reviewed in Canada on January 8, 2025
Just like other Minisforum products it is very well made and no issues so far. I have 4 more HX99G and UM790Pro units and all work like charm.The only problem with this MS-A1 is that the U.2 adapter was not included in the box. This was the main reason that I purchased this Mini Workstation for. That is why I have given this one 2 stars only.As the package seemed to be factory sealed, I assume that Minisforum assembly line did not put it in the box at the first place. I appreciate if Minisforum could send me the adapter.
Alejandro Villagomez
Reviewed in Mexico on January 10, 2025
Buena relacion precio/performance
Kyle
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2024
From the easy access to the board to the features the board has on it, This pc is a powerhouse ment to work.For a home lab, small ProxMox server, it has been great.I only wish it was a bit larger for more pcie option.
Grimmace
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2024
Works great. I added RAM and an M.2 with no issues. Easy to take apart and reassemble. BIOS picked up the items right away. I also added a 10GB RJ-45 card with no issues. Had some booting problems at first, but after playing with the security features in the BIOS I got OPNSense to load. I am using this as an OPNSense router. Overkill, but it can do anything now, 10GB SFP+, 10GB RJ45, and 2.5GB RJ45 connections. M.2 is fast and plenty of memory. OPNSense works great on this box. It's quiet and the HDMI adapter and usb ports work great with my KVM switch. A great small PC box for anything you need.
Jason C
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2024
I realized I rarely take my laptop anywhere, so I bought this console as a replacement to use in my office. The computer is compact and powerful. I removed the 32GB RAM included and easily added 96 GB DDR5 RAM, which I purchased separately but still came to a total cost of less than half what an equivalent laptop would cost. The memory modules are below the fan. At first, the fan was loud, but I changed the power settings and that stopped.***Update. After adding the additional RAM, I realized the hibernate function stopped working. When I tried to enable it I was getting error code 0xC000007F. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to resolve this error. Nothing worked until I finally learned that the C: drive or your Windows partition drive must have the equivalent amount of free space as the memory you've added for Hibernation to work. Thus, I had to shrink a contiguous partition and add it to my C: drive until I had 96GB of free space to get Hibernate to work again. I'm not lowering my rating from 5 stars, but be mindful of this if you upgrade the RAM.
David J Brodhagen
Reviewed in Canada on October 25, 2024
This little guy packs a lot of power! Numerous expansion options combined with super fast thru put makes this a perfect solution for my nas and virtual environments! ( I bought three ). So far everything has worked out of the box with no issues. I’ve had the units for about 2 weeks now.
Customer
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2024
I bought three of these for a "small" Proxmox cluster and sadly, one of them came with a mangled socket on account of its own protector coming loose while in transit and hitting the pins. I asked for a refund and proceeded to buy a new unit.However, the new unit had a different cooler on the back, there was no heatsink for the main NVMe and instead it came with a cooler for the VRM, which IMO is not as useful as the previous one. Also, the new unit did not come with the U.2 adapter, which is just unacceptable.All in all, these perform quite well, they come with 2 PCIEx4 NVMe slots (at least per the manual), allowing me to create a 6-drive Ceph cluster. They do support 96GB of RAM, but could not find the option inside the BIOS to make it run at 5600Mts, as advertised; I'm limited to 5200Mts.
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