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?
A grand?? You can pick up a used Lenovo Tiny for 50 bucks (US) on EBay.
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.
You could build a Framework desktop with one of their past gen motherboards. Also look for surplus servers. The first 1U servers I bought were only about $150 and lasted many years.
Check out minisforum, for example this intel mini-pc. They have a ton of selection, not just that one example.
This seems like exactly the site I’m looking for! Thanks
You also have beelink that makes these small PCs
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
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.
Cost of electricity is non zero. Distributed computing between pis might be the most cost effective way (hardware and electricity)
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.
You could pick up a used laptop for pretty cheap. Low TDP, leagues ahead of a Pi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
And look better.
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.
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.
Second hand Intel 6/7 gen is probably the best bang for the buck right now. Relatively power efficient too if you turn off the turbo-boost in the bios.
Debatable. Boost through a task and be done quickly, with some more power usage, or chunk along longer with probably more power usage. Would have to be tested, but I’d bet on the boost.
Yes, it depends a bit, but you can use a smaller ATX PSU if you don’t have to account for power spikes due to turbo boost, and these PSUs are somewhat more efficient when they don’t run at 10% utilization only most of the time. Also allows using smaller DC/DC Pico PSUs that would struggle providing peak power.
if you’re in the u.s. check walmart for clearance desktops. we just picked up (to replace an older neighbor’s dead atom-based desktop) a new i3, 8gb, 256gb nvme, slim desktop. inside it had mount points and the cables for two sata (3.5in + 2.5in) and a slim optical (or a ‘creatively’ mounted second 2.5in). we were going there to pick it up at a bit over $300, as i had seen it there the previous day. surprise! it had just got marked down again to ~ $200. original price was $400.
Damn that’s a steal! Guess I may have to go the old brick and mortar route.
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.
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
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