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 $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
There’s the Orange Pi 5 Plus if you want something really energy efficient. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8 core CPU, dual 2.5G ethernet, and it can use an M.2 2280 SSD. It looks like there’s going to be a 32GB version, but it’s not available yet.
I’ve heard good things about used/refurb HP (elite desk and pro desk) and Lenovo (m700 and m900) mini-pcs. A quick search shows they’re going for ~120-140$ 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.
Most of my services use a network mounted drive so storage isn’t really a factor (although the more the merrier of course).
My main bottleneck is computation power.
That’s what I’ve literally just traded up to from a Pi. Prodesk 600 G3 comes standard with a 6 core i5 8500, has 4 full size ram slots, an m2 ssd slot and has a mount for 3.5” hdd, all drawing only 65w.
There’s a low profile one as well but then you’re stuck with sodimm, no space for a full size hdd and no pci-e slots.
I picked it up second hand for NZD 100 so I imagine it would be even cheaper in the states.
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?
It looks like it regularly goes on sale that cheap on Amazon, at least in my region:
I’ll recommend the EQ12 instead. Comes with DDR5 and 2x2.5Gb NICs. When on sale it’s ~$200.
I’ve been doing computer stuff for a long time and now I have a really dumb question… what’s the benefit of 2x NICs?
In case you don’t have a 2.5gb switch and you daisy chain to a NAS or something?
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.
It’s a 6W TDP CPU, but not 6W for power consumption.
At full tilt it’ll be about 25-30W, but typically it’s around 10W for me.
Hi! Could you please indicate how you manage the system on the beelink? Base OS, how you deal with storage , containers or VMs?
Thanks in advance!!!
Base os is Ubuntu, Plex Media server is installed via apt from Plex repo, *arr services (lidarr, sonarr, radarr, bazaar, sabnzbd) all run on containers which I manage in a docker compose file. Media storage is an external, 4 bay SATA enclosure attached via USB. 4 six terrabyte disk drives in raid 6 on lvm/md, plus a 4tb SSD which is stand alone storage, formatted as btrfs.
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 |
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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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.
There’s a big shift happening right now, you’re right on that.
Traditionally, ARM is not as capable in solving complex issues, but more efficient.
That’s why it has always been used on smartphones for example. You want a lot of battery and don’t need to do highly complex stuff on that, that’s what you have your PC for.
The big focus in the last years has always been to top the competitor in terms of performance, and only right now, people begin to question if the computing power they have right now isn’t enough and if they rather wouldn’t like to have a device that’s more efficient.
The tradeoff is, you’re more limited to this specific architecture. Apple solved this by making a compatibility layer for x86 apps, but that of course comes with a performance hit.
I’m no expert in that topic tho, so take all I said with a lil grain of salt.
Right now, I think you’re better off with x86, because your server will definitely run on some sort of Linux, and we don’t have any compatibility layer or something like that yet.
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.
Thank you for your insight, I see your point.
Why do you say they abandoned desktop computers though? Aren’t they still designing and selling iMacs? Aren’t those considered desktop computers?
