New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
raspberrypi.com
raspberrypi.com
I might have chosen RPI5 if it had 16GB ram, but I went with x86 and I like it because there are no software issues anymore (redpanda was not working on rpi)
Basically a small server for self-hosted applications.
I run: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, VPN, Nextcloud, Qbittorrent. More things are on https://selfh.st
Everything is in Docker + Portainer. Makes it super easy to manage. The setup uses 17 watts.
I use them as xcp-ng hosts.
Depends on really what do you want to do. For just data storage, NAS, pretty much anything goes. If you want to run VMs, Docker etc. you want something newer. Personally I use Optiplex Micro 3080 with i5-10500T. That was 270€ refurbished.
>Do any of these support ECC ram
No, as far as the Dell, Lenovo, HP mini PCs goes.
>And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use?
Yes but reading your use case you probably don't want a mini PC. You can only have 1x 2.5" SSD and 2x NVMe SSD. A single 8TB NVMe SSD is currently 1000€ and you would need two. Unless you want something smaller of course.
I think most of my use-case could be covered by one or more mini pcs, since I mostly run stuff like Home Assistant and other small things in containers. But for storage I'm not sure what makes sense now. I went with zraid2 back then (in 2015) because I already had four of the 3TB disks, so purchasing two more was worth it for the cost and extra parity drive.
But now I'm not sure if ZFS is the right choice. I think now you can expand pools with more disks, in theory anyway, but I never tried it.
I don't know what options I should consider, and why. Unraid for example looks promising, since you can just keep adding disks.
Realistically most of what I have on the server is replaceable, I really only care about personal photos/videos/documents.
If I am replacing hardware to lower power consumption/electricity cost, spending lots of money to do so does not really make much sense. I would very much like to get 90W+ of heating power out of my home office though, it's noticeably cooler in the room if I turn off the server and other computer(s). Less spinning disks and less hardware would help with that part, but other than making the office cooler I don't think I would save that much money (initially anyway).
The disks I have are from 2015, so probably better to make a choice for hardware/disks now than having to emergency purchase one or more of them to replace failing ones.
You should look around on /r/homelab there are some nice low power consumption builds there, for example this one
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1935nar/homelab_na...
Some vendors on eBay allow you to make an offer for a lower price, it’s worth a try.
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
I ask all this because I'm sick of my android tv boxes locking up about once a month, and I'd like something a little more powerful.
THe n100 is tiny, but has enough power to run 3-8 VMs. I used to use KVM, but moved recently to proxmox after I wore out the disk.
I still have some Pis about to do GPIO stuff, but for _serving_ I used x86
Each n100 has an average power draw of < 8watts at the wall (thats when doing lots of CPU.)
Nice to see Asus have finally started doing something with them.
I see there's lots of competition (or at least, lots of options) in that space now.
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
I keep saying this despite being somewhat a fan of ARM. If x86 or subset of x86 opens up it will still be able to compete in many areas.
Oh well. Pat is gone now I need to remind myself I shouldn't care about Intel.
They do look good. Though, I think aimed at business. So probably some upcharge.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-Tiny-Desktop-Mini/...
Excellent because of the quality of their BIOS/Firmware. You can throw anything at them, and it just runs without errors.
Even most exotic stuff like https://genode.org , not to speak of any *BSD, Solaris-derivative, or some Linux.
Suspend to RAM, and successfully waking up from that works every single time, without special setup, no matter where and what.
Hibernation/Suspend to disk is up to you and the setup, but no problems there, either.
Rock solid experience even with the 'most riced' kernels and userland by https://cachyos.org running Plasma/KDE on 'oh noez! BTRFS!1!1!!'
If the number of ports and their speed is enough, they are good for homelabbing and even casual desktop-use. Expansion not so much, except via USB3. (5Gb/s only)
I know nothing about later models, but these are more than enough for my uses.
Very stress free.
Another alternative is BeeLink's S12 series, which accept 2.5" SATA drives and M2 NVMe drives. However, the NVMe port on these systems are x1.
Both are silent (for active cooling), dependable systems, but not as silent and small as a passively cooled RPi5.
Here is a comparison between the models: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/04/intel-processor-n95-...
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.
A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device which you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something. They're that reliable from my experience.
I have a newly acquired habit of getting the thing which requires the least amount of maintenance for my needs. I can replace it with a more powerful, power hungry and noisier device if I really need that, however this is rarely the case for me, and I can use my laptop for that oddjob.
Sure, but there’s a lot more in it; like a power supply.
No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.
Maybe the tasks it does are light from CPU/IO perspective, but the burden I offload to it is tremendous.
The N100 systems I have are desktop systems which spend most of their life powered off or at standby.
Yes, but like I said there are also mini pcs that meet or exceed those specs that don't have any fans nor any coil whine. Of course you need bigger heat sinks when you draw more wattage (or maybe you're fine with some thermal throttling), but even this is quite manageable. I have multiple machines like this that are 100% reliable with zero maintenance.
I’m not ignoring or denying these systems’ existence. I just note that they don’t fit into my constraints and requirements for my home server needs.
Is this booting from the SSD.
Also not an argument for users buying 2GB/4GB models I suppose.
They're slightly slower at peak, but they're also a much fuller package with SSD interface, Intel graphics with multiple monitor support and no need for running custom linux distros due to x86.
If you need a ton of fast and sophisticated GPIO, small size, light weight. passive cooling, battery-powered operation, a PC starts looking a bit problematic. That's where an RPi fits in.
(Otherwise, indeed, an ESP32 has rather adequate amounts of compute and RAM for many control applications.)
Building any server on a SD card or external HD is just causing stress for their future self.
But wonder if the competition has caught up.
Seems like lots of other options with more power, cheaper. Or maybe not. I'm kind of looking for an opinion on this.
For the price, and what I use, I would probably buy a mini PC at this point.
In general, with boards that aren't Raspberry Pi, always focus on the now, and not the things it should be able to do later. Often they're stuck on a kernel with whatever patches they run at release. Sometimes the community fixes that, but not always.
Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.
The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.
This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.
1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education
2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.
3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".
What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s very easy for mundane information to be lost and so it bears repetition.
I don’t believe I’m offering a safety briefing, I believe the author is making the point that if you’re looking for something to host a service, you will be better served with something more suitable to the task. And not something that is designed for something completely different; constraining the supply and making things more expensive and difficult than they need to be
• GPIO for hacking - basically an Arduino but a real computer
• Low power use (practical to run from a battery for some purposes)
• Tiny form-factor
Price seemed to be more of an "it doesn't matter that much if you break it while hacking with it" factor than a reason-to-buy.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio...
Incidentally that slide deck mentions the pi zero - which is still very cheap (the 2w is about $20 where I live), so I guess they're still honouring that even if their fancy one is pricy-ish.
Edit: I also found this article from before the original pi release https://hackaday.com/2011/05/06/miniature-pc-packs-a-big-pun...
The comments in that thread are very focused on the price point (many doubting it could hit $25, which it actually did reach) so I stand corrected; it was clearly part of both the marketing and the attraction.
With the exception of the Zero, Pi has always been playing in the realm of "this is a real computer, except cheaper". And that's a pretty crowded space these days.
Why would someone buy a Pi5 when they can get more power for the same price?
And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.
The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.
Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:
"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.
In sum, there are two groups of users who have purchased/considered the R.Pi products: (a) people who have homelab infrastructure, (b-c) people who enjoy a learning platform and may also like the Pi 400 and Pi 500.
The R.Pi's support and community are worth the increased cost.
> "Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Cheers for the laugh. ^_^
Raspberry Pi offers models ranging from $10 to $120, all readily available — more so than ever.
Adjusted for inflation, the original $35 Raspberry Pi Model B (launched 2012) would be $50 today. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is also $50 today and vastly outperforms the original, delivering far greater bang for buck.
Though I can’t speak to their internal decisions, it’s seems from the outside that they continue to try to maximise the value of the Raspberry Pi while maintaining the original price point.
Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni, one of the first Raspberry Pi resellers.
You get solid OS support right from the beginning, and HATs are designed for their boards.
I still have a Raspberry Pi 1st Gen running as an OpenVPN server, which I upgraded last year to the back-then latest official Raspbian 12.
I also have a Radxa ROCK 5B with 16 GB RAM which is crazy fast compared to the Raspi 4 (this R4 is currently the core of my network), but the OS support is a horrible experience.
So I just ordered mine, which will allow me to finally upgrade and merge 2 Raspi 4, and move the MongoDB database from the Radxa over to the Raspi again, since MongoDB stopped supporting devices up to and including the Raspi 4 around 3 years ago.
The only two issues I had with Raspberry Pi was the problem they caused when they upgraded the camera stack, and now the move from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS, which will affect around 5 of my older, low memory boards (mostly Zeros).
One thing that frustrates me after running Raspberry Pis for years is that RPiOS doesn't really support in-place upgrades. You have to more or less set them up a new with each major release, despite the Debian origins where this is of course robustly possible.
The article is very feel-good with the carbon credits and all, but the inflating pricing is a disservice to the hacker community. It shouldn’t be sort of greenwashed.
It would make it inaccessible for hobby projects that need more than one and to most kids that need to buy it for computer science classes (or schools that budget for these things). Those were very important purposes for pi, the main purposes, according to some.
And yes, one might say — but inflation. To which I would say — bust cost of living crisis. Anyways, computing should be accessible to everyone, it’s what Steve Jobs called a bicycle for the brain. If raspberry cannot afford do make this pi cheaper, they should design one they can afford.
So long as there are cheap pis (as you mention), I will continue to love the brand. Even if they have premium models. But if they shift to more expensive pricing for all pis, which is sort of what seems to be happening very gently, that would be disappointing. That’s my point.
It also had 1GB RAM, 1.2GHz CPU and 100mbit Ethernet, while the RPI 5 has 2.4GHz CPU, iGPU, hardware HEVC decoder, 2GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and more.
But yeah, overall I agree, they seem to be slowly raising the prices (even when accounting for inflation) which isn't too hopeful to see, but at least they seem to have some footing to raise the prices, as the new ones has a lot more features than the old ones.
In the end, there are alternatives that will give you more performance/spent money, although probably with worse software support...
It costs $120. If you're not an impoverished person living in the developing world, this is not "expensive."
(I think I'm actually more irked than most people about RPi going public, but their product pricing still seems okay to me)
And it’s not even low power any more.
I don't expect Apple like power/performance ratio from everyone, but they could at least try...
Active coolers exist to fit within the tiny footprint. If you have the space, you can go with passive cooling or a cooling case (essentially a large heatsink).
Wouldn't that be the new Mac mini?
1. LLMs / AI: you can run llama2:13b on the Pi 5 natively, though at a pokey 1.4 t/s or so. Training small models for use with camera projects is easier too.
2. Web apps / consolidating containers: You could run a few 'beefy' websites off one Pi, as they're often memory constrained more than CPU-bound nowadays (my Drupal site requires 256 MB per PHP thread). (Though an N100 mini PC could be a better option if you care less about the energy efficiency).
3. Experimental gamers (probably like 1/10,000th the size of the other markets) who want to run modern AAA games with eGPUs on arm64... I'm one of like 10 people I've heard of who have attempted this lol
4. Clustering enthusiasts: usually we have more dollars than sense, and having arm64 nodes that cost $120 new with 16 GB of RAM per node means we can have more raw container or MPI capacity than with 8 GB nodes...
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspber...
The N100 has a more powerful CPU[2], and can use OpenVINO which llama.cpp supports, so better token performance than the Pi. The N100 has far better storage performance due to x4 M.2 slot, and if you need even more RAM you can upgrade[3] it to 32GB.
The RPi 5 was a very niche board to begin with, the 16GB option at $120 even more so IMO.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007511663921.html (semi-random example)
[2]: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchm...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/179c9m1/comment/k5... (needs to be single module, not dual)
How that works out in practice depends on workload though, while the N100 consumes more at idle, it can also finish workloads much faster so can potentially spend more time at idle. While the RPi 5 idles at around 4W (including a NVMe) and the N100 at around 15W, the RPi 5 uses 12W at full tilt[1], ie close to N100 idle power draw.
Alternatively the N100 with 32GB of RAM can replace two or more RPi 5's in terms of performance, so in that regard might even come out ahead.
[1]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issueco...
A bare RPi5 seems to idle around 3 W, which a bare N100 can absolutely (out)do (these are designed with S0ix/s2idle after all).
If you add gigabit ethernet, you'll add 0.5 - 2 W (depending on the controller).
If you add NVMe, you'll add 0-4 W - NVMe SSDs vary wildly in both their own power consumption and how they interact with CPU C-states and ASPM. Some SSDs prevent low C-states and thereby increase CPU power consumption a lot, for example (even in S0ix). This is generally true for every PCIe peripheral (including network controllers), but NVMe SSDs are popular troublemakers in this area.
I honestly don't believe any of the "N100 idles at 15 W" numbers. First of all, that substantially exceeds the power limits of the N100, by like a factor of three. So clearly the vast majority of that power isn't being dissipated by the N100. Seeing how N100 boards generally have only one heatsinked component, the power is dissipated elsewhere. Second, people rarely post their exact hardware and how they measured this. "Idles at 15W [because there's a spinning hard drive attached]" is not very interesting. Third, many of the N100 boards have ATX power connectors, and if you use any old ATX power supply, that alone can cause such a number. Fourth, if you're using a cheap power meter, many of them are still wildly inaccurate at the low end. And, fifth, as a reality check, even much older 1L PCs using actual desktop platforms, even with separate chipsets and all that jazz, don't idle at 15 W. Unless you're using Windows, then, maybe. But Windows can't and shouldn't be the yard stick for power efficiency.
I have a couple of dozen Pis, I typically buy 3x of each generation, but recently I retired everything below a Pi4 and use a Minisforum mini-PC I got for ~£260 with a 8c/16T Ryzen 7 mobile, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD, it can do what all of the Pis were doing before and still have a tonne of CPU headroom, and I can double the RAM to 64GB if I need more.
Factoring in the cost of the Pis, coolers, PSUs, storage etc it was literally cheaper than all of the Pis and has performance and features in a different league to the Pi.
Power consumption is lower than the number of Pis required to run the equivalent workload by some way.
All of these are quantitative metrics I (and many others) don't care about.
- All save for one machine in my home are now ARM. I like the consistency, e.g I can share Nix derivations or Docker images.
- N100 has no GPIO, which I like to tinker with from time to time.
- N100 does not support my favourite HATs that I own or consider as potential buy.
- N100 are one size fits all. There's a whole array of Pi cases and thermal management that can be picked up for any reason ranging from purely technical and practical purposes (fan vs passive, sealed vs open, human/environment protection...) or simply because it's fun and engaging (e.g NESPi case with SSD cartridges)
- N100 come in subtle variations that you have to care about. Pis are "fixed targets" physically, hardware-wise, and culturally, which makes them easy to consistently target, support, recommend, educate about, or find books for (e.g gifts for kids).
- N100 are this century nondescript dull beige boxes, while Pis are engaging through and through.
Pis and N100s are qualitatively different. A Pi5 is simply an upgrade over a Pi4. All that matters is that they're fast enough.
Given the list of things you care about, the RPi5 is not really an upgrade over the RPi4. Hence why I think it's a very niche board.
Had they instead made the RPi5 be a cheap RPi4, I think it would have been much more interesting. I bought some RPi4's 2GB boards when they were $30 each. That was a great price and enables a lot of fun and interesting use-cases.
Pi’s niche is the ecosystem. It hasn’t been about cheap in a long while.
$30? That was a great price indeed.
In 2019 I bought a 2GB Pi4 from an approved seller for £44, which is about £56 in today's money. The 4GB Pi5 now sells for £57 from that same seller (the 2GB Pi4 sells for £42, or £32 in 2019's money)
16 GB is really a minimum for anything that's not embedded.
Price is precisely linear, not polynomial! $5/GiB (price= $40 + $5 * xGiB)
The graph isn't spaced correctly on the x axis, which causes confusion.
Shameless plug: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.
[0] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ [1] https://mxlinux.org/
You can decrease the to-disk syncing to e.g. once per day.
```sysctl.conf vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 86400000 ```
My suspicion about the many uSD cards I've killed is power issues, power loss, etc. In terms of wear, I don't think a typical Pi would be doing enough to wear them out unless it was being hammered.
Add one of these to your development environment, use it for building and packaging, deliver to the lower-spec memory devices being shipped.
This can be a massive productivity boost.
If you use it as you would a PC then it's actually not enough RAM. I have 16GB on my laptop and desktop computers both, and as I always keep browsers running they're always out of memory, even with 16GB swap added.
Just came in to my office.. and my office computer with the same spec had killed all the desktop applications due to memory overuse, just as it always does when I leave it alone for a few days.
Granted, I do have a lot of windows and tabs open, that's because I need to move away from stuff and do other things for a while, but when I go back I need it to be there just as I left it. But browsers are eating memory. All of them. Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi.. you name it.
For something working as a desktop PC I'm looking for way more RAM than a meagre 16GB. For a Pi which I use just for a single purpose I'm fine with those I have.. 2GB , 4GB, 8GB (which I use for different things). I'll never run a browser on any of them though. No way.
I've been looking to upgrade my aging PowerEdge T20 (also hate the fan noise), this is looking very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Geerling makes a video about this exact use case.
And within that range there are a number of options with different CPU power, connectivity options, and RAM. Take your pick!
[1] Raspberry Pi Zero - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero
[2] Raspberry Pi 5 16GB - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5
My network test boxes run 100 GbE of various flavors supported by E810-CQDA2.
The price is still way off though, as always.
I wonder if this means the 16GB Pi 500 wedge computer will be $150?
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...
I would respond but HN is limiting how much I can post per day, only 4 posts.
Orange Pi 5 is the go to solution for IRL streaming right now as well as router. The openwrt project has created a special variant of the orange Pi, but the regular one is cheaper and has more features. Both are very well supported. Claiming it's an eventual paperweight is FUD and not true.
The choice is really between Raspberry with good custom software support, and an x86 minipc that will run literally anything generic effortlessly.
Both my raspberry pis and orange pis run armbian so they're isn't much difference on a software level for just running software (k3s, docker etc).
Here's your $20 Pi (still supported and available to buy): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w
Here's your $120 Pi (many times faster and with 32 x the RAM): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5
The choice is right there for you with many other options in between...