Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Once you jump up into the 4GB model and are looking at "home server" or "media server" type functionality, other solutions might be more attractive.

For example, used ASUS Chromeboxes are all over eBay from $50-$120 or so with a real SSD, x86-64, nice enclosure, etc. And they are easy enough to use a SeaBios ROM with for regular Linux instead of ChromeOS.

Edit: not disputing the Pi is king at lower memory / lower storage / lower cost points.

View on HN

I got a HP Compaq Elite 8200 with a i5 and 8GB of RAM for 50 bucks on Newegg about a month ago. And shipping was free too.

I stuck in a spare ssd and 8TB drive. It is running Ubuntu.

Right now it acts as a pi hole, nextcloud server, Channels DVR server, Plex Media Server, and runs Transmission. It barely breaks a sweat.

I used to just have a Pi 3B+ doing duty as a pihole and nextcloud box.

This works better and overall cost less than the pi once I added in the sd card, case, fan, power supply.

I grabbed a $45 eBay Dell 9010, added a $12 dual NIC card, installed VMware on an tiny thumbdrive, threw in an old SSD and HD, and used the 4GB DIMMs I had laying around. Makes a perfect server for pfsense, media, and whatever web stack I want to spin up.

The Lenovo M72e is another USFF PC you can find with 8GB ram for $100 or less. Comes with WiFi too.

Seconding this, I run a couple of these in my basement and they are great low cost, low power servers.

But the i5 is much more power hungry than the Pi.

Processors are pretty good about only using what they need. And compared to my hot water heater and fridge the closet computer sips juice. Shit, I have two 60 watt light bulbs illuminating my porch all night to keep raccoons away from my garbage bin.

I'd love to know how you find these great deals on Newegg. I've heard of them in the past and their search engine seems to make hiding them a thing. Thoughts and thanks in advance.

I try to keep everything I have running 24/7 as low power as possible. On the other hand, RPis quickly become overloaded for many tasks and so you end up needing a half dozen of them. On top of this there tend to be thermal management issues especially on the newer models.

Fortunately there are a lot of great options for SBCs now that are more powerful than the RPi. For example, I run an NVR for multiple cameras on the ODroid H2 which has a quad-core celeron, dual GbE, and 2x SATA - for only around three times the cost of the rpi 4 B. x86 isn't the best for power consumption but opens up options as far as OS. Due to video encoding rpi-based camera solutions often get close to requiring one rpi per camera!

I replaced my x86-based file server with the Kobol Helios4, an ARM-based SBC with 4x SATA. They've recently announced the Helios64 which will knock it up to 5x SATA with a faster ARM SOC, and comes with a hot-swappable drive enclosure that at least appears to rival the hardware of e.g. QNAP at a far lower price point.

I'd strongly recommend that people look around a bit on e.g. HackerBoards before assuming that an RPi is the best fit for their application. For example, a lot of people are running various 'single-purpose' network applications (e.g. pihole) on RPis when for not much more there are multiple options with multiple GbE ports and faster processors.

That Helios64 case is gorgeous. The only downside is they seem to have lost the ECC support they had in Helios4.

This was my conclusion too. Ended up getting a certified refurb i5 Lenovo with SSD and 16 GB of ram from Micro Center for $350. Yes, more expensive than the pi+ hard drive solution but still pretty cheap overall.

+1 an used laptop might use a bit more power but it has an enclosure, built-in UPS, cooling and SSD, has an x86_64 CPU and probably better specs. An all-around better choice for many many purposes.

Hard to add additional NIC (or two) to a laptop.

Similar options on a laptop as on an RPi, at least (so, USB?)

I'm using a USB Ethernet dongle in my laptop. They're cheap and Linux seems to support all of them these days.

For about 2x the price of an Rpi4+accessories I picked up a used Lenovo workstation and an SSD. 16gb ecc ram and four cores. Much nicer than my attempts to use Pis for various server-like things.

Dell Inspiron workstations work well too. I used one for FreeNAS for years because it had ECC.

I fell for the ECC myth as well when using ZFS on XigmaNAS, but got schooled here on HN a while back: https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...

ZFS without ECC may not be any worse than any other filesystem without ECC, but it's still nice to have on a system you want to run all the time and deal with your files.

I have a box with 128 gigs of ECC RAM and I see a handful of corrected bit flips every year. Ain't no myth, just gonna be a crapshoot where those bits fall and what effect they have.

I moved from a Pi server to a mini PC with a Ryzen processor and 16Gb RAM after even the Pi4 with 4Gb was starting to struggle with the number of tasks it was running (Unifi controller, Pihole, Home Assistant, etc - none of them are massively power hungry, but together they made it crawl at times). Still have a Pi next to the TV for media display, but it's mostly due to better subtitle support than the TV's built in streaming apps!

Which mini pc?

It's a DeskMini A300, so not an official "Mini PC", but bunch of bits stuck together. Still has 1.5Tb of disk space though - turns out that you can get 500Gb HDDs for free, since no-one wants them!

HP stopped selling these a few years ago, but I bought an HP Stream Mini[0] to be my replacement HTPC after my original Raspberry Pi Model B was starting to chug on 720p videos:

I was sold on it after reading an enthusiastic Ars Technica review.[1] I quite liked the thing. Its specs were a little anemic out of the box, but despite being the size of a tupperware container, I was able to swap out the flash HD for a proper SSD, upgrade the RAM, and even swap out the WiFi card for a better model. It's still holding up as my media center five years later.

[0] http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2015/2015CES/St...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/cheap-functional-upg...

I replaced all my SBCs with a single Ryzen 3 3200g-machine. It was more expensive, but at about $350 it replaced 2 RPI, 1 odroid xu4 and a rock pi. With performance to spare.

Ryzen 7 2700 are cheap now. If I upgrade the ram and cpu I can make it a nice VM machine for very little.

I'm looking for a small guy like this, or those mentioned in the children with AMD/opensource graphics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com