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)
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.
Here is a comparison between the models: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/04/intel-processor-n95-...
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.
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. ^_^
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Building any server on a SD card or external HD is just causing stress for their future self.
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