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?
If you don’t care about GPIO/serial lines, frankly buy a small NUC or a used Thinkcentre M93p. Used, you can find them for very cheap (£100 in my case), they are powerful enough for your needs, you can have an actual SSD storage, and you will avoid the odd issue with a software not working on ARM (less and less the case but still worth taking into account).
I’ll second the NUC–I use one as an HTPC and another as a headless server. Both run quiet, though there is a single small fan. Can’t speak to power usage though.
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.
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
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.
Old laptop or PC. I use an intel NUC for mine. Hosting 30 docker containers
rock64 works pretty good for my use case as a 700 mbit router.
I’ve heard good things about the rockpi.
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%.
I can’t get a usb webcam working on rock64. Just a heads up, the software support is very poor.
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
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?
Of the alternatives available, Libre Computer, Pine64 and Orange/Banana Pi all offer options that fit what you’re looking for. You can generally find these on Amazon, eBay etc at a reasonable price.
The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.
a cheap second hand laptop will be both faster and will have better wattage and what is basically an internal UPS
alternatively any used thin client will do well to. Cost around 50 bucks and has waaaay more power than a pi while not consuming much more.
i prefer the laptop due to impossibility of a brown out / blackout affecting it. it is basically an active ups
That’s true - as long as the battery does not catch fire :D
Are you using any charging utility? Like Macbooks are drawing power from Power brick as long as the battery is full. Still they are sometimes discharging to around 50% to keep the cells alive.
nah laptops in the last 5 years have features like that so you dont need to worry about all that. most have them in the bios too so no weird software needed
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!
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.
Thin client! They’re significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage, I’ve had sd cards go bad in pis
Thin Clients are the way to go! I got a Dell Wyse 5010 for cheap on ebay and replaced the internal 8 GB DOM memory with a 1TB SSD so it’s basically a NAS now.
It does take a little DIY (video) but after that it runs more performant than RPis I’ve had in the past
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
Do they have a fan that will get noisy after a while?
