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?

  • marsokod@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    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).

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • nocaptchaforme@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • blaine@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve got a Rock64 running OpenMediaVault with about 6-10 Docker containers. Works great and the power consumption is very minimal (~1A).

        • blaine@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          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%.

    • orangeboats@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • PopYaCork@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • banana1@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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!

  • unixorn@readit.buzz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Sphere@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • nicman24@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    a cheap second hand laptop will be both faster and will have better wattage and what is basically an internal UPS

  • brotherballan@lemmy.one
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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

  • BigVault@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Notorious@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    It’s not that difficult to get a Pi 4. I wrote a python script that scraped rpilocator’s rss feed every 5 minutes and would notify my phone when one was available in the US. It went off basically every day around 8:30am PST when Adafruit would drop 100+ Pi4s. I’ve picked up two in the past week (one for my Voron printer and another for a RetroPi cabinet). They did sell out fairly fast… in about 10 minutes or so.

    • homelabber@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      The thing is that right now it’s not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.

      • Notorious@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Power wise you are absolutely correct. It is not the best performance value anymore. However, support for the Pi4 is much more robust when using them in specific projects designed to use them.

    • saucyloggins@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Sorry I have to laugh at this. If you have to write a script for it even if the script is easy there’s no way I can consider it “not hard”. Not hard is just being able buy it like anything else.

      I get what you’re saying though.

      • Notorious@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I didn’t realize it would be so easy when I wrote the script. Knowing what I know now I’d just check adafruit every couple minutes starting a bit before 8:30am PST.