DIY Raspberry Pi 4 mini server includes UPS and OLED information display
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Unless you need some GPIO or something I wouldn’t bother.
Edit: my home server is a Lenovo T440 junker which the main battery doesn’t charge any more as the polyfuse popped. Has 12Gb RAM and an i5. The internal battery is still good though. So I stuffed a 1Tb SSD in it, installed Debian and disabled the lid close event and job done.
This means it's the ideal low power server device for home hosting with lead-acid backup if you can get 1Gb/s up+down fiber!
Unless you need quality disk, then you should probably look elsewhere too, but a 1TB SanDisc SD card har pretty low power draw; atleast it has got that working for it.
But you need better ergonomics than this, sealing it is a sure way to overheating.
I'm working on the final design of my raspberry cluster:
I'm actually a large fan of the Pi but people seem to think it's lower power than it actually is: but the performance trade-off is real.
the -peak- power consumption of a Pi is 15W (but it's difficult finding an adapter which will supply that).
So if we're talking peak power consumption the Pi would win because most decent quality mobile x86 chips draw something like 15w by themselves at peak, but if you look at something with the m3-8100y[0] then you've got a CPU that draws 5w at peak, and has 10 PCIe lanes instead of just 1.
they have boards with this kind of platform: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1404.html
If you're looking to get a super low energy homeserver these absolutely dominate on peak usage.
But, a rpi and a laptop are roughly comparable in terms of idle power consumption. Unless it's like a gaming laptop or something. Mine draws 3w during "idle"* from the wall and I have a Xeon E3-1505M v6 (45W TDP).
[0]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/185282/...
- "idle" meaning with a few containers, a window manager, the screen turned on and wifi enabled/connected.
And humanity is probably stuck between 2-3 for eternity (usable cheap X86/ARM/RISC-V, not fringe prototypes).
Pi 4 uses 7W CPU full 400% blast for about 14 Gflops, how much does the LattePanda give at peak?
Next step up is Atom at 25W.
Also you have to add size of the cluster and cost of the PSU and cables to the equation.
More PCI lanes is only interesting if you plan on using them.
I'm pretty sure Gflops on f.ex. this site is without SIMD as it makes no sense to compare CPUs like that: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html
Re the numbers at that site, that's using OpenBLAS linpack which is likely utilizing SIMD but can also be memory bandwidth bound.
I’m hard pressed to think what else you would want in a file server.
Storage uses PCI lanes (4 for NVMe), network uses PCI lanes (1 for each gigabit of network, typically).
I use my servers as MMO backends, partly they will serve files, but mostly they'll do real-time networking and db stuff... some AI for the monsters and validation for anti-cheat so I need CPU more than fast storage or network.
But, we’re talking home servers and for _most_ people that’s a file server, or something heavy with I/O and SATA is still I/O.
Most (if not all) SATA controllers interface to the CPU with PCIe (lspci will show you a SATA controller on the PCI bus)
Size? I’d never change my chinese x86, 10W TDP, mini-pc running OPNsense for a Pi. Its perfect size. But I have to use Pi for my drone video, nothing else will fit.
I’m not saying there are no reasons. But people salivating at the Pis as a be all and end all of low energy devices are a bit annoying.
The Pi is primarily a tool for students and to a lesser extent: makers to get a general purpose computer to be as cheap as possible for the purpose of education.
But people want it to be home servers or to compete with other products of a higher price point. But it betrays the original purpose.
If someone sold a raspberry Pi with half decent power distribution on it, SATA or NVMe storage, I might raise one eyebrow but at this point, compared to even low ball commodity laptops it's a joke of a product which is squarely destined to end up in the e-waste bin.
Hasn't been true for a while now. The Pi 4 can boot from USB storage.
Just give me a native SATA or NVMe port.
I'm sorry the $35 computer doesn't have all the storage connections you'd like it to. It's still very useful for the rest of us.
There you go, now you too can use a Pi :)
I want a couple of PCIe lines on the SoC on an M2 NVMe connector. That's all.
The Pi makes sense for projects where you need a low performance embedded solution with GPIO, but I don't really get the point of using them as replacements for normal x86_64 servers purely based on power consumption, because their performance is not very good when you include IO.
They're great for building stuff for fun though, a bunch of Pis in a cluster is relatively pretty cheap compared to anything else for experimentation.
I paid $75 each since they just popped up on ebay and I was curious, there was not much info on them that I could find at the time.
A bit more compact and alot cooler. But still you cannot compare 2nd hand prices to a new Raspberry 4, interestingly I suspect Raspberry 4 second hand prices will rise over time as nothing as robust will be made. Just like the old v7 Raspberry 2 which are very low power for what they deliver.
Now they have the Pi 4 2GB model back in stock here in Sweden at $45 after 6 months of the price being $80 because it was sold out. Eventually they will have to move on but I don't see how a Raspberry 5 could be better for my uses...
We'll see!
Having a full blown laptop would be overkill. A cheap ARM-based sbc consume less than 5W of power, which is good since it run 24/24.
The peak power is of course higher than a Pi, but they generally are near-idle most of the time.
Depends on what you use.
If you look at the schematics for the Pi 4 the power distribution is flawed. The USB-C 5v in is directly connected to the internal 5V rail. There is no buck-boost or power conditioning or protection past a 5v-ish TVS diode. So any I2R losses on the PDU can cause a rail drop and the device to shat itself and trip BOD. And this is likely because to cut costs there's fuck all decoupling on the power supply rails. One high current drain or spike and bye bye kernel and SD card - corruptathon!
It's a joke of a product built to a price point which barely works. Most people are running on pure luck, not engineering.
This has been a problem with every generation of Pi so far. The tradeoff is a really bad one.
And with proper care raspberries are very stable as well. SD-card is the biggest downfall but for most applications you can either more or less have a read-only system or boot from network.
According to the bill of materials linked from the project website[1] the project cost is $175.67 not including the 3D printer and laser cutter or the raw materials they require. (Though it does include duplicate screens, wires, screws, etc which may hold some value if you are doing multiple projects.)
A used ThinkPad T440 i5 is available for $250, possibly less elsewhere.
[1]https://www.the-diy-life.com/mini-raspberry-pi-server-with-b... [2]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JBZB5JU
Even with the above SSD upgrade, $250 is a bit much for a bog-standard T440 - recycling centers have them here working for approx $150 USD, usually the i5 variants.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Raspberry-Pi-Foundation-re...
Thanks!
edit - https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/software sounds like you're going to be running their fork of Ubuntu or Android without the abovementioned guarantees for updates
But I don't want to build kernels as part of normal operation once it's set up, I want the device to last its expected useful lifetime with just periodic apt updates. This means a LTS distro that ships kernels for the device. Otherwise the setup is fail-open security wise, depending on my constant active tinkering.
Maybe Odroid happen to be exceptionally good and the vendor provided Ubuntu fork is good enough for this, but I don't see an easy way to check their track record over a longer timespan and for devices that are several generations behind their latest and greatest.
Other SoC typically have just one native SATA link (like A20). SoCs with better connectivity exist - that's what ends up in consumer NAS products after all - but SBCs are sparse and expensive (e.g. MachiattoBIN).
You could go for a CM module and do your own expansion board with a SATA controller on PCIe but then you may run up against the x1 bandwidth (if it's PCIe 2.0 then probably fine for two drives).
ROCKPro64 has a x4 PCIe slot you could use with an HBA card I guess. But at this point I'd probably go for a Celeron ITX board.
Some time ago I would suggest just getting a second-hand NAS and running Debian on it (like QNAP TS-219P) but with Debian 11 dropping support it is less appealing.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/16/rockchip-rk3566-and-...
Just look on the internet for NAS and pine64.
https://www.amazon.com/Resolution-Electronic-Controller-Inte...