A cheap used office computer with a good CPU and decent RAM can far exceed the power of a Pi. That’s been my strategy. I just Frankenstein it a bit with leftover parts from my gaming computer and load it up with disks.
There’s good deals on lenovo m900s or dell optiplex that are great for this. New enough to have low idle wattage and decent performance for VMs and containers, and old enough that they’re cheap.
I’ve done it a ton in the past, I’ll do it again in the future, but having a essentially plug and play tiny little box that sips juice and still does what I need while being silent… is rather nice
I do this. Random ebay junk is both better and cheaper than a raspberry pi. When I first started doing home server stuff, I had the option between an Athlon XP and a raspberry pi and the Athlon XP delivered better performance (I tried both).
I have a RPi1B that runs Pihole just fine, and I have a RPi4 that runs a bunch of services fine (plug in a SSD, don’t use a SD card).
But if you’re hoping to do a photo server or run a media centre… nah. Rpis are very power efficient, but for media you really need something that’s gonna suck more power.
The Raspberry Pi: When “a computer, any computer” will do. I have so many of them in service bolted to the backs of televisions or monitors as digital signage.
Removed by mod
Spare parts don’t run on 5-10 watts.
Removed by mod
Everything is a trade-off ;-)
yep i do, amd phenom x6 with 8gb of ram is still rocking!
but not for long, i have too many services for the ram and it swaps too much.
Removed by mod
My Goodness Why Didn’t I Think of That!
A cheap used office computer with a good CPU and decent RAM can far exceed the power of a Pi. That’s been my strategy. I just Frankenstein it a bit with leftover parts from my gaming computer and load it up with disks.
Removed by mod
There’s good deals on lenovo m900s or dell optiplex that are great for this. New enough to have low idle wattage and decent performance for VMs and containers, and old enough that they’re cheap.
I’ve done it a ton in the past, I’ll do it again in the future, but having a essentially plug and play tiny little box that sips juice and still does what I need while being silent… is rather nice
Removed by mod
There are external drives the pi can access via USB, 480mbps. Should be fast enough for most LAN uses.
Mine is a server I got for free because the person I got it from didn’t want it anymore as he was going to something more power efficient
Mine’s running dual Xeons with 192GB of RAM
Edit: I really do need to upgrade it to something less power hungry though
Removed by mod
I just imagine the power in three zip codes flickering (I kid I kid)
I do this. Random ebay junk is both better and cheaper than a raspberry pi. When I first started doing home server stuff, I had the option between an Athlon XP and a raspberry pi and the Athlon XP delivered better performance (I tried both).
A PC drawing 150 watts will burn through $225+ in electricity a year. The raspberry pi maxes out at like 6 watts.
RPi is the best performance to operating cost you are going to find if you don’t need more juice for high intensity stuff (transcoding, etc)
Just me lol
I cobbled my home server together with twine, a 14u server rack and some used poweredge servers.
Well yeah. I do, out of necessity. I can’t justify buying a pi yet. Someday I hope to.
Removed by mod
I have a RPi1B that runs Pihole just fine, and I have a RPi4 that runs a bunch of services fine (plug in a SSD, don’t use a SD card).
But if you’re hoping to do a photo server or run a media centre… nah. Rpis are very power efficient, but for media you really need something that’s gonna suck more power.
The Raspberry Pi: When “a computer, any computer” will do. I have so many of them in service bolted to the backs of televisions or monitors as digital signage.