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Wisest Upgrade from Raspberry Pi

I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I'm only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I'm not sure of the best bang for my buck. I'd like good, long-term performance, but I don't really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I'm thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?

InvertedParallax ,

Lenovo m715q, ryzen 2400ge isn’t bad, put more ram and an nvme and it’s solid.

zampson ,

I have a stack of 5th - 7th Gen tinies I can’t seem to get rid of lol

DARbarian OP ,
@DARbarian@artemis.camp avatar

PM me if you need help getting rid of 'em lol I'll take one off your hands

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

My suggestion is to either recycle an old pc/laptop or find one on craigslist for $100 and use the rest of the money to take your husband/wife out to a nice dinner.

Pretty much anything built in the last 15 years will be a big upgrade from a Pi.

billwashere ,

What about something like one of those Beelink Mini PCs? A friend sent me a link to one and I was amazed at the specs.

youtu.be/zt-5vJdmu0s?si=6tcnq721k0cXB2uG

Gutless2615 ,

Those intel NUCs are amazing while they last. A j4125 will chug away transcoding anything you’d like. It’s been a wonderful upgrade from my pi-stack, and well within your price range.

Redditiscancer789 ,

As the computer nerd in my friends/family circle, Im constantly being gifted old PCs from people. Some I keep and repurpose into servers/other things and others I just recycle for them. I also am an avid PC gamer so when my rig gets retired I usually upgrade the other servers internals from parts I had left over. Don’t know if something else is viable for you to keep costs down, even if you can get the PC without a HDD but everything else.

Fermiverse ,

I went for the ASRock J5040 board, 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system using a PCI adapter , 2x4tb ironwolf as ZFS mirror pool, 350 W power supply all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.

Runs proxmox as hypervisor for VM or Container. 6 LXC running motioneye, plex, pyload with openvpn, syncthing, rclone cloud backup and openbookshelf.

Typical power usage is around 20W

Faceman2K23 ,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I recently replaced a pi4 with an intel n95 based mini-pc and it’s been an absolute joy. I moved a few of my services and VMs over from the main server. It runs my Homeassistant via HAOS in a VM significantly faster than the pi4, another VM with access to the IGPU runs a 4k dashboard feed into my video distribution matrix, a few containers for simple things like MQTT and Adguard Home (like pihole) and it has room to do more.

The whole computer with 16gb of ram and 256gb SSD cost about the same as a pi4 8gb did when the shortage was at its worst.

The other option of course, is a cheap older optiplex, for under $200 you can get quad core sky lake or kaby lake generation processors, 16gb of ram and room for a couple of SSDs, a bulk storage HDD and a couple of low profile PCIE cards.

poopsmith ,
@poopsmith@lemmy.world avatar

I got a free computer and upgraded the processor to an i7-6700T (eBay) and some old SSDs. It measured around 15W and I haven’t had any problems with it. It is miles ahead of using any Pi or ARM-based SBC. I would really recommend just finding a used computer nearby, if possible. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace has some killer deals.

AA5B ,

A second Pi? According to the RPI Locator, Raspberry Pi’s are available for list price now.

My use case is a bit different in that I don’t know what containerized services I want to run, except that I want to play with Kubernetes. Raspberry Pi still seems like a good choice and I may restart that project soon

DARbarian OP ,
@DARbarian@artemis.camp avatar

I'd rather keep all the services to a single more powerful device and then relegate the Pi to more specialized, Pi-related tasks like a smart doorbell cam or Home Assistant Hub.

AdminWorker ,

Cost of electricity is non zero. Distributed computing between pis might be the most cost effective way (hardware and electricity)

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
LXC Linux Containers
MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
PSU Power Supply Unit
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
k8s Kubernetes container management package

[Thread for this sub, first seen 18th Sep 2023, 18:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

PanaX ,

I have one of these and it’s outstanding:

www.amazon.com/…/B0B3WYVB2D

DARbarian OP ,
@DARbarian@artemis.camp avatar

Holy shit that is so cheap! There's gotta be a catch, right?

Devjavu ,

Not that I know of

Krtek ,

laptops are sold at the same price with similar components, so no

PanaX ,

Nope. I was in your position with a Pi400, got tired of the poor performance with streaming UHD stuff across multiple devices and went with the ser. I now have a ser 5 and 6, and they are beasts for their size.

gorogorochan ,
@gorogorochan@kbin.social avatar

For me, the small energy footprint of an ARM machine is really important for home usage so I personally went on multiple occasions with Odroid’s offerings and as long as you have a tinkerer’s soul, I can really recommend it.

DARbarian OP ,
@DARbarian@artemis.camp avatar

I also want to prioritize power consumption just because I can't afford server rack levels of electricity, so I will have to check that out.

maiskanzler ,

Intel’s low power offerings are sometimes even less power hungry than a RPi and handle more stuff. I like Asrock’s line of CPU-onboard motherboards and use one myself. You get the convenience of a full x86 machine but it sips power. Mine peaks at ~36W with full load on CPU, GPU, RAM and 4 SSDs or disks. Usually it is much much lower. You can always go smaller with an Atom x5 z8300 (~2W Idle without disks or network, 6W with both and some load), but those are getting a little old and newer stuff is better and more feature-rich. Maybe an N100 machine with 4 or 8 gigs of RAM are a good option for you? Don’t go overboard with RAM if you are using docker for everything anyways. I use 8 but 4 would be more than enough for me and my countless containers. I run Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Resilio, Photoprism and a few more. Only the minecraft server benefits from more than four. Very happy with my J5005 board.

rsolva ,
@rsolva@lemmy.world avatar

In that case, I can recommend minicomputer’s like HP EliteDesk G2 800 Mini. You can get them with a variety of intel CPUs, they can take up to 32GB RAM, they have slot for M.2 disks and a regular 2.5" SSD – and they hardly use any power when idle, between 5 to 10 watts, depending on the CPU and CPU governor settings. They are sold used for ~€50 and if you buy newer generations you’ll get even more umpfh for a bit more cash.

In other words, very competetive with the Pi’s, only more available, cheaper and about the same power consumption!

thirdBreakfast ,
@thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world avatar

And look better.

UnPassive ,

You could pick up a used laptop for pretty cheap. Low TDP, leagues ahead of a Pi

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

This is a great suggestion. There’s so much e-waste out there that could be more than powerful enough to be a major upgrade from a Pi. If OP has a PC built in the last 15 years it’s almost certainly the cheapest (and greenest) solution.

ThorrJo ,

Just get a used ultra-small form factor PC a la the Tiny, Mini, or Micro series. A higher-end one which is 7 generations old will still absolutely destroy the Pi in terms of performance.

Once I gave up (for now) on doing all this on ARM and switched back to x86, everything got way easier to actually accomplish.

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