Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
You must log in or register to comment.
I use a N100 Mini PC. They’re very popular for this purpose these days. Mine has 16GB DDR5.
Wait, the N100 supports DDR5?
4 and 5, yes. But only single channel (arbitrary Intel limitation).
Where I live, electricity is also very expensive. I monitor every watt.
I asked the same question half a year ago, here’s what I’ve learnt: RPis tend to be less reliable and aren’t that energy efficient. They’re great for small appliances, but for servers (e.g. NAS) not as much.
Get an used Thinclient/ mini PC. They cost something between 50-150€ and give you a huge performance boost, more ports, a x86 architecture, are better repairable (still often bad) and more.
Mine uses about 10-15 W on normal use, and 20 rarely when my cloud is under heavy use.
Just curious, why is an x86 architecture a sought after feature in your opinion? My understanding is that ARM is more “bang for your buck” in terms of computation effort to power draw.
I say this because my M2 (ARM based) MacBook does all sorts of heavy lifting and still lasts me more than a day on a single charge compared to my old Intel MacBook running the same services doing the exact same stuff.
Please correct me if I am wrong. I would really appreciate to learn more from people who have more knowledge than I am.
why is an x86 architecture a sought after feature
Software compatibility.
My understanding is that ARM is more “bang for your buck” in terms of computation effort to power draw.
Yes but it’s also usually a small “bang”.
my M2 (ARM based) MacBook does all sorts of heavy lifting
The new Apple silicon is a quantum leap in technology in many ways. Apple managed to make something with desktop-level power and SBC-level efficiency. It’s why they abandoned desktop computers altogether.
The industry is in the process of shifting in that direction but they’re still way behind Apple.
Your best option would probably be to buy a refurbished office PC that has at least 16 gb of RAM.
Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GCX4JKJ
That way you get a bunch of memory in a decent system for cheap, and you’re only using up one port on your switch.
I’m not super into the whole sphere here. But as you mentioned the Pi I thought I might chime in. I just ordered a Pi 5, 8GB RAM and 2-3x effective speed of the Pi 4.
I’d youre looking for more powerful hardware in this format the Rockx 5 and Orange Pi 5 are alternatives that go up to 16GB RAM.
Those are all arm though
I had budget to try xeon d soc motherboard for a smal itx case. Put 64gb ecc ram into it but could hold 128gb. That server will be 8 yo this year. That particular supermicro mb was ment for some oem routerlike 64_86x with 10g ports and remote management. I’m not sure if intel or amd have any cpus in that segment anymore, but it’s very light on wattage if mostly idle/maintaining vms.
One option I’m looking at is to get a dedicated hetzner server, even the auction and lowest grade ‘new’ offerings are pretty good for the price if you account for energy costs and upfront gear cost.
Power to performance wise a pi isn’t actually that good. A thin client can run on less than 60W and offer far more performance
60W vs 3-4W isn’t really a fair comparison…
My N100 MiniPC runs on ~10w
I’ve heard good things about used/refurb HP (elite desk and pro desk) and Lenovo (m700 and m900) mini-pcs. A quick search shows they’re going for ~120-140$ for a quad core with 16 gigs of memory.
I’ve been looking all over for something in that price range, where did you find them for those prices?
Do prefer the Elite Desk though. The Pro only has one drive bay, so you’d have to use an adaptor to use the slim optical bay for a 2.5" drive. The Elite has 2x 3.5" bays and one 2.5" bay plus an NVMe slot so you can build a decent starter NAS. It’s also got 4 DIMM slots for up to 64 GB of memory and if you get a 7th gen Intel with it, it’ll have hardware accelerated transcoding.
Ebay. Or whatever is your preferred local classified app.
You need a minipc (you can look at the TDP for power usage)
I upgraded my Plex and *arr server (i3 nuc) with a beelink 12i N100 based mini pc and could not be happier. $167 with 512gb nvme and 16gb RAM. It pulls 6W peak power
Where do people find equipment this cheap? Ya’ll are mind blowing with your ability to score things for such low prices.
Any links?
I’ll recommend the EQ12 instead. Comes with DDR5 and 2x2.5Gb NICs. When on sale it’s ~$200.
It looks like it regularly goes on sale that cheap on Amazon, at least in my region:
Is Plex doing any transcoding? That 6w peak is Pi Zero territory! Wow.
Hardware transcoding is highly efficient. The downside is sometimes it introduces artifacting in low resolution live TV.
With Intel QSV enabled it should be able to transcode like 4-6 1080p streams IIRC. Quicksync is very impressive hardware acceleration.
With hardware support enabled it can live transcode four 1080p streams, which my old NUC (5th Gen i3) could also do. The GPU on the NUC could not handle 4k, so it would fall back to using the CPU which would not keep up with a live stream.
The N100 can transcode one 4k HDR with Atmos 7.1 audio and stream in real time. It was just a test, there was a bit of a stutter as it settled in, but I think that might be due to the drive enclosure being connected via USB, so it was storage bandwidth rather than CPU/GPU. The USB ports on the computer are 3.2 gen 2, but the enclosure is only 3.0 at 5Gb/s.
There’s the Orange Pi 5 Plus if you want something really energy efficient. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8 core CPU, dual 2.5G ethernet, and it can use an M.2 2280 SSD. It looks like there’s going to be a 32GB version, but it’s not available yet.
That looks very sexy, what’s the price range on those?
The 16GB version is around $160 US with a 256GB eMMC module and case.
At this price point, why are RPi’s even a thing? Wow!
More and more people are asking that question every day. Especially with the company going public.
Established ecosystem, I’d guess. Also brand recognition. I mean, you can tell that this one is also called “some fruit name” PI, for good reason.
Get a cheap SFF desktop, slap some cheap RAM in it and run KVM. It’ll be 10X better than a fleet of Pi’s.
If you don’t already use it, zram swap is great for providing a little bit extra oomph. If your server doesn’t have a lot of compressed data in memory, it can literally more than double your effective ram.
Doesn’t swap reduce the lifespan of storage though?
Zram swap is basically this: Turn all of your free ram into a swapdisk. Compress all access to that swapdisk.
So, it’s not using you storage, buy your memory. Most stuff in memory is usually highly uncompressed - so it compresses really well.
Instead of getting the additional space from disk, it’s getting it from compression.
Can you please explain to me the difference? How does a swapdisk compare to RAM? I don’t mind googling it but I highly doubt I’ll get a straightforward ELI5 style answer from there.
I would really appreciate it if you can elaborate, if you have the time that is.
Thank you.
It just compresses your ram contents so you can fit more stuff in memory at once
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #515 for this sub, first seen 15th Feb 2024, 04:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I had Plex in my name first!
But any old PC that is x86. Even if it second hand/refurbished (as long as it’s a branded pc Like HP, Levono).
I‘d just get an old computer. My server runs my whole homelab with 4 spinning disks, 2 ssds while having 10+ services. It takes 50 watts since it is pretty old but it works well. If I turned off the spinning disks it might be even lower.
It takes 50 watts since it is pretty old
I bet most of the power is used by spinning disks. My setup (diy desktop) used 22W with 3 SSDs, but after replacing one SSD with 3.5" HDD it went up to 35W
How do you monitor your wattage?
With Shelly Plus Plug S
Jeez! Thats quite a lot! Thanks for mentioning.
