ASUS VivoMini VC65 modular PC supports up to 4x 2.5-inch drives

[HEXUS]

And the VC65R adds RAID support. These Skylake mini-PCs are under 2 litres in size.

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[lumireleon]

inbuilt power supply is not a good idea. If it dies what next?

[DanceswithUnix]

inbuilt power supply is not a good idea. If it dies what next?

These look aimed at companies who will either:

1/ Run machines with a warranty agreement
2/ Be prepared once out of warranty to just throw it away.

[crossy]

inbuilt power supply is not a good idea. If it dies what next?

The fact it's got a COM port (RS-232 to the rest of us) screams "business only" to me. In which case there'll be a nice warranty package protecting it. Plus, and maybe I'm being easy on Asus but, maybe that power component will be modular and hence easy to replace? I suspect that the inbuilt PSU was to keep the overall thing looking clean.

Now if you want to pick fault with them, I'd look at:

"They are remarkably silent as well, generating as little as 21dB of noise at idle, and 35dB at full load," says ASUS.

How can something be "remarkably silent" - either it's silent or it's not. Now if they said "remarkably quiet" or even "near silent" then I'd agree.

As to the unit itself, if it'd be able to RAID those drives and boot from an SD card then I'm thinking that it's got real potential as a back-of-the-TV media center.

[whatif]

QUOTE DanceswithUnix

These look aimed at companies who will either:

1/ Run machines with a warranty agreement
2/ Be prepared once out of warranty to just throw it away. QUOTE

After some horrible personal experience as well as reading many other similar reports, I would have to agree totally with your second point. After my second product problem - I had to wait over a year to finally get a warranty replacement of a motherboard - I find that their empathy towards customers with a problem is non-existent. My first product problem also went through a difficult and unnecessarily extended RMA process (example - I would contact Asus and not receive a reply for weeks and weeks). So you may as well throw it away at the first sign of a problem.
Such a pity to as they produce some products with nice features, just hope never to have a problem.
Maybe they will offer businesses a better form of warranty than general consumers.

[EndlessWaves]

inbuilt power supply is not a good idea. If it dies what next?

Same as you would on any normal desktop, whip it out and put a new one in.

Of course, they may be using a proprietary power supply instead of FlexATX but the PS/2 power supply started out as a proprietary one too. Give it a couple of years and there'll be a standard form factor for small internal power supplies.