Since rpis have been almost impossible to find, I’ve been looking around for alternatives for some local self hosted services like home assistant. A lot of boards seem to talk about GPU, GPIO pins, etc. But I really just want a single board, fanless (low power), decent CPU and RAM, ethernet.
Any recommendations?
I gave up on using raspberry pi for running servers.
I ended up buying a $60 lenovo on ebay https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-tiny-guide-and-ce-review/2/ and then loaded it up with 32GB of ram. Now I run a proxmox hypervisor and around 20+ containers/VMs. Best decision I ever made. I just spin up servers willy nilly
If you don’t need GPIO then run a hypervisor. Cheaper than SBCs and more useful.
I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?
Sure, but I just told you I’m running over 20 servers. Try running 20 raspberry pi’s 😀
My resources are being shared for around 20W of power.
Pis consume lower power, but are less powerful also. I think thr Power Consumption VS Performance is way better on Tiny/Mini/Micros. The Pi4 may idle at 3-4W where a 8th gen USSF will idle at 6-8W, but will provide more than 2x the performance IMO.
I prefer paying almost the same price for a USSF with an i5-8500T than a Pi, even if it consume more, idle under 10W is great, and they let you go up to 65W if needed!
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
Do they have a fan that will get noisy after a while?
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I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab
Works great.
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After running Plex off a pi for like 6 years I think I’m finally about to graduate to a old PC in my closet
Hi SirPyschoMantis,
I’m certainly no expert but just recently started a similar project you are describing. I went with a used HP ProDesk 400 G2 mini. It has a i5-6500t, 8GB and 250GB ssd.
I run Ubuntu server on it with docker. It’s compact and capable of running a bit more then a Raspberry Pi I believe.
When searching for a Pi alternative I also came across a similar mini pc from Dell. Thats was a Dell OptiPlex 3040 SFF.
I’m from the Netherlands and used prices here were around 100-150 €.
Second this, but don’t go for the dell minis. I have had trouble with them no recognizing 3rd party power supplies that are often shipped with refurb units.
I’ve had good luck with the lenovo tiny PCs.
Look for secondhand thin clients such as HP T620. They’re usually can be had for $30 or less (or more) depending on the configuration. They also have low power usage, not as low as a pi, but still low enough (<10 W).
The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.
This is slightly different, but in this rpi drought, I’ve set up proxmox on an old laptop and have several VMs/LXC/containers running on it. It fills that same role for me. I don’t know exactly what the power cost comparison is, but it’s gotta beat several rpis running simultaneously.
2nd this - great way to have tons of flexibility
I have a similar setup but with a lenovo tiny pc.
Another advantage is that I no longer have to worry about sd cards randomly dying
It’s not that difficult to get a Pi 4. I wrote a python script that scraped rpilocator’s rss feed every 5 minutes and would notify my phone when one was available in the US. It went off basically every day around 8:30am PST when Adafruit would drop 100+ Pi4s. I’ve picked up two in the past week (one for my Voron printer and another for a RetroPi cabinet). They did sell out fairly fast… in about 10 minutes or so.
The thing is that right now it’s not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.
Power wise you are absolutely correct. It is not the best performance value anymore. However, support for the Pi4 is much more robust when using them in specific projects designed to use them.
For everything else I have a much beefier Unraid server that hosts all of my dockers and VMs.
Sorry I have to laugh at this. If you have to write a script for it even if the script is easy there’s no way I can consider it “not hard”. Not hard is just being able buy it like anything else.
I get what you’re saying though.
I didn’t realize it would be so easy when I wrote the script. Knowing what I know now I’d just check adafruit every couple minutes starting a bit before 8:30am PST.
Hard for a “layperson”, maybe. But IMHO for someone interested in self-hosting this probably should not be a hard problem to solve, or at least a decent “warmup exercise” to see if you’d like it.
I say this because you don’t even need to write the script yourself, there are plenty of preexisting applications that can be configured to notify you of updates to an RSS feed.
I’m sure I could whip that up in changedetection.io or Node-RED pretty quickly, for example.
I don’t use a dedicated RSS feed reader app, but I’d also be somewhat surprised if there isn’t one that supports some form of push notifications.
I don’t need to run amd64 containers, so I like the Orange Pi 5 for raw ARM compute. For $149 you can get one with 16GB of RAM, an NVMe slot and 8 cores, all for < 15 watts.
If you’re looking for something to be a disk server, the Odroid HC4 doesn’t have as many cores or RAM but it does have 2 SATA slots in a toaster configuration.
I’m looking around for a SBC too, under 100$. Can’t find stock of banana nor orange Pis. So i forgot about those. I like the features of the odroid boards, and the radxa rock boards. I’ll probably buy the rock 4; seems like a good option.
OrangePi 5s are in stock on Amazon
This is definitely the way to go or a nanopi
The OrangePi 5 is one of the better options right now. Starts at $80 for a 4GB (RAM) model and goes all the way up to a 32GB model. CPU is roughly twice as good as an rpi 4, so if you want you can underclock it with no fan and get solid perf still
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The 5 just came out this year and I don’t think it has an LTS model. Are you sure you didn’t get a 3 LTS or a 4 LTS?
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rock64 works pretty good for my use case as a 700 mbit router.
I’ve heard good things about the rockpi.
I can’t get a usb webcam working on rock64. Just a heads up, the software support is very poor.
I’ve got a Rock64 running OpenMediaVault with about 6-10 Docker containers. Works great and the power consumption is very minimal (~1A).
That’s honestly pretty impressive. Well done.
Thanks! It’s installed on my sailboat, so the primary concern was efficiency from a power perspective. I wanted something I could run off 12V DC with the lowest possible power consumption that would still do the job.
I’ve got it running the Jellyfin/Radarr/Sonarr/Sabnzbd stack for media server purposes and PiHole for DNS. Even with DDclient and Wireguard containers running, the CPU utilization at idle averages around 25%.
Intel NUC running Ubuntu.
This is what I use but with Debian. I had an older NUC 8 i5 lying around so I decided to drop 32GB of RAM and a new 1TB NVME drive into it. The performance is way better than a Pi and the measured power consumption at the wall socket is under 5 watts idle (peaks at around 13-15 watts under load if I recall correctly).
In terms of noise level, if I start loading the CPU heavily the fan can be noticeable … however at idle or when it’s just streaming Plex content to my TV (without transcoding), it doesn’t make any fan noises at all.
