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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I run a couple of N100s with 32GBs of RAM. They're great machines, but they are actively cooled, so they have dust (and noise) issues, and they're bigger than a RPi 5.

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.

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There are many good options for passively cooled N100s (or even machines with significantly faster chips) roughly the size of a mac mini.

A Mac mini is still significantly bigger than a Raspberry Pi 5. On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.

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.

>A Mac mini is still significantly bigger than a Raspberry Pi 5

Sure, but there’s a lot more in it; like a power supply.

An official RaspberryPi 5 PSU is akin to a 27W mini brick which doesn't block any adjacent sockets on a power strip. However, the power bricks came with my N100 systems are similar size to 60-80W MacBook power bricks, they're way bigger, even if they're not significantly more powerful.

No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.

If you were to build it yourself, you can find passively cooled N100 Mini ITX motherboards (I own an Asus N100 Prime) which you can fit with a pico ATX PSU or HDPlex PSU. Pair with a SFF case, you could get it around the size of a mac mini without the brick. Maybe something like a skyreach case.

Again, too big for my requirements. What I want is a box I can forget until it breaks or I need something directly from it. RPi5 allows me to do that while handling a ton of workload for me.

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.

> On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.

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.

As I said earlier, these machines doesn’t fit my space requirements, and I don’t need more powerful machines due to my processing needs and unwillingness to have space heaters. So, ARM based single board computers fit the bill perfectly for me.

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.

"A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something."

Is this booting from the SSD.

Nope, from the SD card. Quite fast though. SSD is just a storage volume.

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