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Comment by faefox | Hacker News Reader

> "I suspect that a similarily configured Raspberry Pi 4/5 with all the accessories added on top would result in a price that’s quite similar to the cost of a top-of-the-line Zimaboard."

With respect to the author, why would you not take 10 seconds to verify this claim? A cursory Google search shows that an 8 GB Pi 4 with passive case and PSU is ~$100 all-in. If you can wait a couple of weeks the Pi 5 offers a nice performance bump (and PCIe!) for about the same price factoring in the official active cooler and case.

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Hi, author here. I went ahead and did the math based on offerings in raspberrypi.dk since that's the reseller that the official Raspberry Pi website directs me to as someone living in Estonia.

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB: 92.87 EUR

"Armor Aluminium heatsink case for Raspberry Pi 4": 19.01 EUR

Official Raspberry Pi power supply: 10.80 EUR

32GB microSD card: 12.17 EUR (and on sale)

At this point the subtotal is 134.85 EUR (~142 USD). Budget about 10-20 EUR on shipping on top of that, so about 150 EUR.

And to run two SATA SSD-s off of the Raspberry Pi, you'd need an extra USB to SATA adapters. ICY BOX ones are quite good, those are about 15-20 EUR each, and are unlikely to work properly because of power limitations. I've done the testing in the past, one SSD is OK, two is a bit too much for the board, so you'd need to rig them up with external power, adding cost.

To have something similar, we're looking at about 180+ EUR (~190 USD) worth of gear to replicate what we'd find with a Zimaboard, and with trade-offs and inferior results (USB-SATA is worse than plain SATA).

I think it's a fair comparison, at least with EU market prices.

Thanks OP for the breakdown of potential cost of similar Pi 4 set up.

Interestingly, based on the PiHut prices, the total cost of 8GB RPi 5, power supply, heat sink with fan (active cooler) and case will be around £90. A high quality 128GB microSD card is around £9 and that makes a basic server RPi 5 setup to be just within £100. Add to the fact it has a spare PCIe slot for potential Gen 3.0 of high speed SATA interface and now the RPi 5 is even less power hungry compared to the previous version, the mini home server with RPi is very tempting, indeed.

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