Proxmox on MINISFORUM MS-A1 vs. MS-01 – Compatibility & Best Choice?

[emad.youssef]

Hey everyone,

I'm planning to set up a Proxmox home lab and considering MINISFORUM MS-A1 vs. MS-01. I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully installed Proxmox on either of these models—especially regarding compatibility and any issues faced.
Here’s the key difference:

• MS-A1 runs Intel Core i9-13900H
• MS-01 runs AMD Ryzen 7 8700G (8-Core, 16-Thread)

My home lab setup will include:
10-15 VMs
Docker containers (Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Nginx Reverse Proxy, Nextcloud, etc.)
TrueNAS for storage

Planned Storage Setup:​

• 2x NVMe SSDs (RAID 1) → Proxmox, ISOs, and VMs
• 1x SATA HDD (for TrueNAS) → Using a media HDD to avoid SSD wear & since I don’t have the budget for a full backup solution.

Would love your input on:
Which system is more stable with Proxmox? Any driver/kernel issues?
Does Intel or AMD work better for virtualization?
Any cost-friendly recommendations or better alternatives?
Looking forward to your thoughts and experiences! Thanks in advance!

 

[Fall2fast]

upon doing a search I found this, too bad you don't have any responses.... I too would like to hear some thoughts on this. Did you end up going with one of these setups?

 

[zodiac]

Personally, I prefer AMD CPUs these days. They seem to work a little better than recent Intel models. But realistically, the difference will be subtle and probably don't matter all that much.

Either one of these devices should be good enough to run a decent number of containers. Virtual machines tend to be a little heavier weight and might encounter limits depending on what it is exactly that you are doing. For things like Windows, you don't really have a choice and you need a VM. For lots of other things, you should probably just use the LXC containers that Proxmox VE supports natively. They are extremely lightweight and you can install a huge number of them on any of these two machines.

In general, with MiniPCs there is a limit of how much storage you can practically add. The power supply on all of these devices and the onboard voltage regulators are going to pose a very real limit. If you max out RAM (e.g. 64GB or 96GB if supported), install two power-hungry M.2 drives, and add a bunch of SATA drives either internally or by USB, you could approach the point where you burn out the 5V power regulator. Just keep that in mind and tread carefully. I get the impression that Miniforum devices are designed well and are less likely to spontaneously die because of you pushing the power budget, but it is a concern with all MiniPCs.

Consumer NMVe SSDs are a mixed blessing. They are inexpensive and work well. But they can also die quickly when you have a high write-rate. There are guides how to tame Proxmox VE to reduce excessive writes of detailed logs. That can dramatically improve things and you might be fine with using an SSD for the base system. You should have a plan for backups, though. Even just running PBS in a container and writing backups to an external USB drive is going to dramatically increase your chances of data recovery, when your drives die. It's not entirely without some grief, as you first need to install enough of a system to even execute the recovery, but its doable. If you have the budget for additional nodes and mirrors for your backups, things can get much easier.

For my system, I bought a beefy enterprise server on the secondary market. Much more expensive than a miniPC, but lots of room for growth and very reliable hardware. I then added an HP Elitedesk 805 G8 as a second node. It's actually a very capable machine, that currently costs way too much on EBay (I got much luckier, when I bought mine). If budget was a major concern, I'd just get two of those when they drop in price again. But the Minisforum devices are more modern and potentially more powerful. If that's what you need, then go for it.