I can’t repeat it enough: get a refurbished thin client instead of a SBC when you don’t care about GPIO and physical size isn’t a strict limit. The power draw isn’t as bad as you would think, x86 means you can install whatever you want, and you can just attach whatever storage you want over SATA without having to get more expensive hardware. It also includes a Case and PSU, often for a fraction of the price you would have to pay for a RasPi, especially when having to buy the RasPi, a Case, a PSU and a storage hat.
Seconded, and I'll even add that you can buy second-hand laptops, they even have an included battery that will help you for short outages.
But more importantly, buying second-hand anything is orders of magnitude better than a new Raspberry Pi, because most of the environmental impact is on the building of end devices. Re-using an old laptop you don't use anymore furthers its life. The impact of usage, whether it draws 2W or 50W, doesn't change much on that front.
In any case, please stop buying new things, and re-use existing hardware instead of inducing even more pollution.
I'm running a small website on a Cubiebord 1 SBC off my home internet connection. For such a scenario - home server on a desk, non demanding website such as a wiki - an SBC is a winner. Mine has been running since 2013 with no major outages apart from a few SD cards failing along the way (I had backups and a mirror on a cheap VPS). And I purposely choose not to use an SSD or a spinning disk (I could with that particular SBC) to save energy since that thing is always on and idles at around 2Watts. Noise and bulk were also a factor in my choice. There are no moving parts or spare components that can fail and indeed I didn't had any problem in ten years apart from SD cards. For 60€ - case included - it was a good deal.
If you need GPIO, unless it's high bandwidth stuff, a MCP2221A break out and I2C ADC/expander is probably better anyway. You can stack as many MCP23017 as you need on one of them.
Yes, if you actually do need GPIO, you can still just attach something external unless you need close-to-realtime reactions or high bandwidth.
MCP2221A breakout boards seem to be relatively expensive though (about $10?), my ugly solution would be something like an ESP32 receiving commands over Serial and setting its GPIO pins. Very overkill and a waste of a very capable chip, but ESP32 start at $1.50 or so, that’s hard to beat.
Good idea with the ESP32. As for the MCP2221A boards, there's a fresh supply of them for under $5 from China and they just work out of the box on Linux with off the shelf python library so no having to futz with the brains of the ESP32.
Where are you getting the MCP2221A for $5? I’m assuming you’re in the US? Here in Germany, the lowest price I found was 11€ on AliExpress. Or is there a better source I’m missing?
Used is much, much cheaper than new. For instance, for your futro 720 listed below it was about 350€ (new) and is about 14€ (used) nowadays.
Also brand names and long term support cost quite a bit more.
The new to new, well supported comparison would be
- pi 5 + ssd hat + ssd + stuff (let's say 200 at the high end)
- thinkcentre tiny m70q gen5 (about 450 with student discount; starting at 550 without)
The second is obviously more powerful etc but it costs like three times as much.
In other words: This has nothing at all to do with SBCs. If you don't need higher performance or support, buy used.
Technically correct, but you’re not going to find a used RasPi that’s much cheaper than a new one. So saying “buy used” is effectively the same thing I said.
If you want modern features and low power consumption you can get a new NUC style PC like MINISFORUM UN100L https://www.newegg.com/p/2SW-002G-000H0. For $ 151 you get a computer with normal full size ports (there are options with 2 LAN ports, etc.), storage expansion capabilities and maybe Windows 11 license that is mentioned in manufacturer website.
I love these class of devices so much, and it's so cool seeing what a competitive landscape of devices have sprung up. The AMD APUs out now are amazing, and some of these folks have awesome cooling for them. Idles can be remarkably low (the monolithic APUs have a major leg up vs multichip for AMD). So, big fan.
But. You need to be careful. What level of support if any these devices come with vary greatly. Beelink has pretty good bios updates, pretty regularly: good job. Minisforum almost never releases new bios/firmware. If there are stability or security fixes for your platform, minisforum wont give them to you. It's a terrible situation, and it's such a scary hidden gotcha most people don't consider when shopping.
AMD continues to say the future is OpenSIL not closed AGESA, and that doesn't directly mean but starts to make it a consideration that we could maintain systems ourselves, even without manufacturer support. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-openSIL-September-2024
The SBC can make sense depending on energy cost in your country if you just need a little 24/7 DNS or NAS. I have an SBC w/NVME that idles at 1.4W (~$2-3/yr) and an x86 server idling at 11W (~$20/yr). If you're really nickel and diming your power bill, the best choice is making better use of your existing gear followed by an SBC.
I’m currently using a Futro S720 at home. It’s probably much slower than the latest RasPis, but I only paid 20€ (I actually bought multiple and got one for less than 10€!) for it. A RasPi starts 65€, with accessories you’re probably looking at 90€ or so. The S720 is fine for my use case, but you can also look at the S920, which should have better performance and can still be bought below 25€. If you add the smallest reasonable SSD (128 GB probably), you’re still at only 40€ total.
All the prices are local to me of course, the availability might be different for you.
Here’s a good page with info on many thin clients: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/
I'm using a Lenovo ThinkCentre M715Q (Ryzen 5 PRO 3,2 GHz, SSD 256 GB, RAM 8 GB). Bought it "used" for 180 EUR last year, though it was in almost perfect condition.
Pretty happy with it so far. Runs a few cron jobs to generate some static sites, a local WordPress instance and pi-hole.
I don’t get this argument. If the goal is “buy the most power for a given budget”, how is “but you bought used!” a gotcha? As long as there are no used RasPis with better performance for the price, the used PC is still the better choice.
There are no "gotchas" and I am trying to have a discussion not an argument. The point is that for evaluating a product people have different goals and thus get different value propositions. In particular, I think a pi is a fine product if you value stuff being new and well supported (this also applies in the comparison with other, more powerful SBCs for the same price). If you don't, that is perfectly fine.
In the same vein, why do you prefer or not prefer your mini pc over some random, new n100 mini pc? I would argue that neither is strictly better and that reducing matters to "X is bad, period" is oversimplifying.
Sorry for that, you’re right. For some applications, the RasPi is a good choice. I was just trying to make the point that for private use where price is important and other factors are secondary, a refurbished thin client is probably better than a Pi.
And I prefer a refurbished thin client over a new n100 because for my application, the thin client I need is much cheaper than any n100 PC I could find.
Not really, a Pi with 8GB RAM, case and Power Supply would be around $110 or so, right? With storage even more. And the mentioned PC is probably almost twice as fast as a Pi.
Got a link? The starter set with 32GB SD card and 8GB RAM is £112… so you still have to get an SSD and SATA hat, or the hat this post is about. Then you’re at atleast £125, and your performance will be much lower than the mentioned PC.
It does have fans that I only ever heard spin up during a reboot. I assume you would hear them if the machine is under continuous load, mine isn't). The small dimensions allow you to stow it away pretty easily.
I use a HP T640 currently as my main "home lab" server and I'm planning on relocating the old Dell/Wyse Zx0Q to my mums as a backup server.
I run about 20 different containers at the moment and run TVheadend bare metal with 3 DVB-T2 tuners.
Both machine used USB3 - Sata enclosures for extra storage. Work greats. The old Dell machine even did transcoding in JellyFin for 1080p content, which was not expected given how crap the cpu is in it. Everything ran fast and stable.
Check out Parky Towers for in-depth info on many different thin clients.
Lenovo make some pretty good small form factor x86 computers that can be picked up from ebay or similar for quite cheap. I forget exactly what model I got but I put ubuntu on it and it's been working fine for my applications (Home assistant, slowly migrating my website, might get another to use for NAS purposes)
The Lenovo m720q or the m920q. What makes them amazing despite their small form factor, is that they actually have a 8x PCIe slot you can use once you get a riser card for it. Either to add a GPU, Additional NIC or a HBA card to connect to a JBOD. I'm using a m720q as a OPNSense router and its been great.
Raspberry pi's haven't been all that affordable for a while now. At least not to the extent that I'd pick them over a second-hand usff PC, which will come with x86, which is more desirable(as opposed to arm) despite it's shortcomings and is stupid fast in comparison. At this point the only raspberry I can truly justify is the Zero 2 W. Mind you, I am considering a uConsole as a laptop replacement and I'm somewhat torn if I wanna give it a shot or not.
It will become like Polaroid. Expect batteries, cheap cameras and other disposable stuff. Raspberry Pi is being wrecked by the $100 computers now widely available through Amazon and eBay.
What a weird thing to say. The Pi is more open source than ever. Output is controlled by DRM/KMS. Video decoding uses FFmpeg and OpenGL is now via Mesa. All of that was closed source binaries two generations ago. Kernel changes are pushed upstream if possible too. Sure I can’t print my own board, but that was never the case or the goal.
The Pi itself was never open source hardware; most of the engineering staff (and Eben Upton himself) came over from Broadcom, which is not a company known for much friendliness towards OSS.
$30 for 256GB, $45 for 512GB, and $10 more for a bundle with the HAT all seem like fair prices. However, you can generally find 256GB SSDs on eBay for ~$15.
I will say that an SSD makes a Raspberry Pi feel a lot faster. It boots in no time, the browser opens nearly instantly, software installs zip by, etc. it's faster than many "real" computers I've used.
I hope the next iteration has an m.2 slot built into the board instead of requiring a HAT.
I've bought quite a few Raspberry Pis over the years since the release of the first gen. But I no longer see the value in buying one anymore. Especially for running it as a low cost and low powered server. They might be fine for hardware projects or just tinkering or learning for people wanting to get started. But now there are many better options within the same price range. Some with better CPUs and more I/O options. (After you include the cost of all the accessories you need for the Pi). Plus the benefit of a x86 CPU and also things like Intel quicksync for transcoding if you buy a mini-PC running something like a N100.
Note: they also recently started selling Pi-branded microSD cards; in that case, A2 class cards that are compatible with command queueing making them much faster than most typical C10 or A1 cards people would buy.
These SSDs are mostly just PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, with not much to differentiate from what's on the market today. Though having a first party solution pretty much guarantees compatibility (a few NVMe controllers don't play nice with the Pi's PCIe bus and require some fiddling to get working).
FWIW, Kingson's Canvas Go! Plus A2 cards remove all perceivable latency for SD card based setups, but having a first party, "tested enough" SD card is a good thing to have.
Same for SSDs. 2230SSDs are not easy to find here. So if I can have a 512GB SSD with a HAT, as a starter pack is a great deal for me.
I don’t really get the negativity in some of these comments. I feel like offering official accessories at (potentially) higher prices than ones you can pick up yourself is an ideal business model for a company like Raspberry Pi. Completely optional, you can always DIY, but it lets them make some more money and still keep the price of the base product relatively low. At the same time, it lowers the barrier to entry for people who aren’t as confident with putting together their own kit.
Nice. I suspect that many folks already have solutions for larger storage but this seems like a fairly clean way to get fast-enough storage in a decent amount of physical space.
