I Bought an N100 Mini PC, Then Another | Hacker News Reader

I Bought an N100 Mini PC, Then Another

blog.alexellis.io

36 pointsalexellisuk21 comments

I love the N100s. They are the new Raspberry Pis (for most applications). I use mine for Jellyfin

The latest RPi prices were outrageous when I checked, so I started looking for alternatives. I ended up getting a pretty nice N100 with much more RAM, an actual SSD, and more - all for just a bit more money. It’s been performing really well, and I also use it for Jellyfin among other things. I couldn’t recommend the setup more.

Same, but with N97 (which is IIRC more powerful than the N100, because Intel is weird).

Wanted a travel NAS that would run on USB-C power. Thought about a Raspi5 + M.2 HAT + case. Checked the final price at checkout.

Bought a GMKTec Nucbox G7 instead. RAM is soldered in, but it has 12GB which is more than enough for the foreseeable future. 512GB SSD - again, more than enough and I can upgrade it later.

Now it runs Debian with a local Plex installation along with my Gl.inet router so I can get my series fix even if the internet is spotty when I'm traveling :)

Haha, yeah. I went and bought a CM4 board with extra NIC so I could use an RPi as my gigabit router, and placed an order for a CM4 module (actually several) that didn't arrive until a year later (and they're still unused another 2 years after that). When it was obvious no CM4s were actually available from anywhere, I bought an N100 4 port router, and it's worked like a champ, comes with a decent enclosure and I could run VMs on it, and I can have a 1-WAN port and 3 ports going to a mini-switch in each room, so I don't even need an additional switch centrally. For me, it's far superior than the RPi solution would have been, well designed into a single case and around the same price.

Yeah, if you don't need the HATs. Otherwise, being x86 is a huge advantage in terms of OS availability. I own a Radxa X4 (N100) and a RPi 5, the N100 in X4 is ~30% faster in single-thread and ~60% faster in multi-thread (in benchmarks that I have managed to run on both) - and it cost me few euros less (both are 16GB).

> Someone on Hacker News or Reddit is shouting: "Just use the cloud? Nobody is capable of maintaining a Linux server."

I like to host stuff from my house, and take a sick pleasure in not caring when my self-hosted personal projects fall offline. This is the luxury of personal projects.

For something other people are paying for, I (too) would rather not have to think about tripped breakers or ISP maintenance knocking out the service.

Then read the next bit :)

> Now, if something is public facing and making revenue (or risks revenue/reputation by going down), I will absolutely run that on a popular cloud VM, or on Hetzner's bare-metal offering split up into various microVMs. If possible, I'll run it on a CDN - like my blog, a homepage, or a documentation site.

> Then read the next bit :)

I am concurring with the article, sorry if it was not obvious. Added a (too) now :)

I've considered these, but I find that a refurb MFF PC with an 8th-10th gen i5 provides way more bang for the buck in a package that isn't much larger (typically 7in x 7in x 2in), with out of the box OS and software support.

(my comment from a thread yesterday)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017074

These are popular due to lower power useage, mine idles at around 4w, the power supply is a wall wart style and doesn’t have a bulky mid cord transformer, it supports 2 SSDs and is around 120mm x 120mm, almost completely silent and cost me around 190AUD over 12 months ago. Locally I would struggle to get an 8th gen USFF box for that kind of money.

They’re amazing bits of tech for the price.

> mine idles at around 4w, the power supply is a wall wart style and doesn’t have a bulky mid cord transformer

I prefer the slightly larger boxes like the Beelink EQ14[1] that have internal PSUs with 100-240 VAC inputs (e.g. non-polar IEC C8).

[1] https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150

I work at an ewaste recycling company, and seem to specialize in these MFF PCs[0]. My main work rig is a Dell Optiplex Micro with Debian, shoved under a laptop stand. I host Syncthing and iVentoy on it.

[0] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling/Desktop-Computers...

Good. All these software-only projects need to stop eating up all the pis. Especially when they buy multiple just to basically each be a docker instance. Save them for the people that need the hardware interfaces, not that those people always need a pi either. I'll see people online or otherwise using an entire pi just for acting as a Wi-Fi or uart to GPIO bridge, when a USB device would've worked dramatically better. Literally just an FTDI chip is all they need. Set it to individual IO control, use the library, be done with it. No Linux on a microsd card, no waiting for it to boot, no additional power supply, and a fraction of the price

We should start a support group. I bought 6 minisforum s100. Each one has 4 cores 8G mem and 256 GB uds.

The kicker is that they each have 2.5GbE Ethernet with POE! This allows me to power control them by power cycling the switch port.

I then have a webhook that gets hit from MAAS. They pxe and get provisioned with an os image, the same images also work on large real servers, so this is a pretty awesome mini lab for testing and tinkering.

I was looking at building a small home NAS, but after compiling the list of hardware I would need to achieve what I wanted, it was just cheaper to buy a small NAS enclosure with an Intel CPU and call it a day.

Now it's running Ubuntu, Cockpit, Podman and ZFS for the redundancy, plus some extra tweaks to make the chassis LED display the zpool and volume status from a glance.

N100 and friends is a good NAS+youtube machine. Some mini PCs allow multiple NVMe drives. For a few more bucks you can get entry-level (but much more powerful) Ryzen CPU in a similar small box

A number of people reached out about the Beelink SER4-7 - which are about double the cost of a bare N100. Nice machines and I may have considered them if they'd been more popular at the time.

Certainly, if the main use-case is fastest speed in a straight line - get something with a Ryzen like the Acemagic I mentioned at the end with Geekbench scores.

I see Ryzen 5 3550H + 16GB + 512GB + EUT VAT + free shipping at 152EUR (random Aliexpress deal, says "Ninkear G3 Pro") - not much considering bundled up RAM and Disk, N100 costs a little bit less.

Braindead YouTube-solution would be to buy this device, connect to TV, wireless mouse and install Windows 10/11 LTSC, install firefox + favorite addons. N100 is barely enough for 4k@60, and Ryzen gets a bit more juice to live comfortably

Are they supposed to get that hot at idle?

I have an old AMD geode from PC Engines, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have that problem.

I have an N100 miniPC and it's pretty much killed itself with thermal problems.

I have an N100 miniPC that I'm using as an OPNSense firewall, claims to be fanless but it killed an NVME drive.

Now I just have a small usb-powered fan aimed at it and it runs fine. Fortunately for me it's in the basement so I don't have to see or hear it, but the fanless versions run super hot in my experience.

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