There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.
It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.
If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.
If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.
EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.
Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here
I love to hate claims like this. it’s like a fart, but ends up being a shart. No truth in the source and unjustified noise and grumbles that leaves a mess and confuses people for no reason.
Do yourself a favor, either cite links that legitimize your claims or just sign off, you’re hangry.
I’m just here to say that I’ve never heard any of the negative claims that OP makes from anyone else before.
What I have seen and heard is that the RPi foundation doing a lot of good by providing low cost computers for educational use and anyone else who wants a good, small, and cheap computer.
You seem to have conveniently left out power consumption.
I agree they are very pricey these days. Are there any competitiors that offer cheap low-power consumption computers?
It will not be that great like on Raspberry Pi, but Mini PC are also very low on energy. For example,. Wyse 5070 with J5005 idles around 3-5 W, which is really great. i had HP 800 Mini G3 that idled ~7-8W. Mini PCs are more powerful, expandable and can use normal SSD Drive. For selfhosting they are better, but in some places Raspberry Pi (or alternative like Orange Pi) will be better, especially when you need something small and really low power
I never heard of the orange pi!
Some of the models are very cheap. Have you tried them? If they are as reliable, I might get myself one for a couple of projects.
Yes. I have Orange Pi Zero 2 with 1 GB of RAM running Ubuntu. This is actually very powerful machine, more powerful than my Raspberry Pi 3B+. i bought it for about 180 polish zloty (around 40 euros). I use it for printing server with Ghostscript printer app installed via Snap. I also tried Wireguard and MongoDB - everything works fine. it works really well, but it sits around 50 C on CPU, so it can get hot.
I tried one ~5-10 years ago and the idea was good but it didn’t have nearly the level of support that Raspis have.
I got an 1 gig Orange pi zero 2 with a 2 port USB expansion board. I got it from ali express with a 32gigabyte micro SD card, USB to USBC charging cable for like $40.
I 3d printed a case for it. Provisioned it with a heatsink, fan, 18W USB power supply, and a UPS.
I use it as an octoprint server, the extra USB ports go to a webcam and a fan if i feel like it. It’s been reliable but I’ve only had it a month. Transferring jobs is nearly instant plugged into gigabit ethernet. Transfer is via API key not web interface. Seems to do alright in the CPU department. It has to parse some of the larger jobs for a minute.
Prints perfectly. Only had one resent packet USB packet so far. After it prints rendering out 1080P time-lapses was slow. It would hit like 70% cpu usage and take hours. Rendering out 1080P octolapses with fewer frames and less movement would hit 98% cpu use but be done very fast - like 10 min.
They just announced an orange pi zero 3 with a similar form factor (but not exactly the same) and larger faster memory.
Yeah, power consumption is never talked about enough when talking about that type of hardware. I do have an old PC I could use as a server, but I don’t need more heating at home. Mini-PCs are cool, but how cool are they?
But anyway, I haven’t been able to buy a RPi at decent price in years, so 🤷🏻♂️
You can use a thin client PC, which is usually uses <10 watt. Pi is even lower though, usually <5 watt.
Oh never looked into those, thanks!
I wanted to get something to use as a NAS server and/or a pi-hole.
I’ve been happy with the libre computer LePotato. It’s similar to a pi board.
You’d probably be shocked at how close a 65w supply charging a laptop battery at trickle voltages and a 2A 5v power supply maxed out 24/7 can come to each other
Do you have some source for that?
I can’t see an old laptop running 24/7 as being close to a raspberry pi performing the same tasks.
An RPi doesn’t max out a 2A 5V power supply unless its under heavy load. Idle is closer to half an amp.
They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base.
You got receipts for such a strong claim?
Euuhh what? I used to use an old pc but found out I could save about NZ$100 per year on power by switching to an RPi4. It hosts about 15 things, like sonarr, radarr, home assistant, pi hole, nzbget, photoview, Frigate, and backups, without any issues. Yes it’s not super power full but it’s perfect for me.
You cant beat rpi with power usage, but PC can draw <10W on idle. Well my server is more like 20-25W, but thats 25ish € a year here. Rpi would be 5-10 € a year. I pay around 0.12 €/kwh in Croatia. If you can save 100 nz$ you have hungry PC or your electricity is not cheap at all :)
Just standard raspberry headless os. Everything running in containers except pi hole.
I’ve installed a heat sink and a fan, triggered at 70c. Also have set some cpu docker limits on eg frigate and nzbget to ensure it doesn’t take the rest down.
But it performs surprisingly well. Load is 1 on average, goes up a bit when eg motion is detected, an nzb is parred/extracted, or photoview is indexing stuff.
Also recently added Paperless. Set everything to minimum, eg one document at a time.
Pretty sure you can use the standard raspberry pi os and run all those apps with docker or k3s
Can you expand on some of this?
I haven’t really heard much regarding them being bad to their community/customer base, though I haven’t bought in a few years.
In regards to cost/performance, what are you meaning you’d need to spend extra on to match that of an old laptop or recycled machine?
Not OP, but my Lenovo tiny computer on ebay is about $60 and will run circles around a raspberry pi
Power usage isn’t too much higher, it’s upgradeable, and it’s x86-64 architecture so more things are supported.
My tiny has an i7 and was a bit more expensive, but it’s a powerful little guy. I added more ram for a total of 32, and it does better than my “old” server (technically from same era).
Can’t speak for the other stuff.
facts, at this point you are paying for size, gpio and the fact that its a form factor with industrial grade options easily available. not really as useful for a hobbyist at the price though.
Do you run Windows on yours, or have you installed a different OS to run things?
Not op but I have 3 tiny PCs and I run Linux on them. But then I don’t run windows at all because it honestly sucks.
Same with the HP elite desks, and don’t forget you can get off lease Chromebooks with much better specs than pi for ~$60 as well
The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you’re planning to stack them vertically
I have a few PIs already and like them, but if I was doing a system today I’d probably go with the HP Elite Desk (800 Gen 2 or 3 perhaps), sourced as an ex-gov unit which can be had very cheap. The PIs have gotten expensive enough that they’re basically price equivalent once you add a case and possibly an SSD to it, at least locally. Have used those HP systems at work and they’re decent little boxes.
The caveat is that I’m not too fussed if I’m drawing extra power, as long as the performance justifies it. If power was a primary concern then the PI may still win out. I’m also not going to need to consider size in anything I do, and then then the micro PC form factors aren’t massive.
if you don’t want to be replacing sd cards
The truth hurts, but this is the truth. Clawing at those little shits is the most annoying thing ever.
I think you still need a SD card, and that looks like workaround and not the way its made. Also USB doesnt have enough power for disk so you need external psu or powered hdd case. I was using 1 SSD from USB and it was working, but it was struggling and system got corrupted eventually
If you don’t want to be replacing sdcards every two weeks, you’ll need to add a hard drive with an enclosure which will also need power. You’ll also need an upgraded power supply for the pi. To deal with any sort of scale, you’ll need more than one in a swarm. If you don’t want them just out in the open air, you’ll either need to coat them or put them in cases. It just all adds up to way more than a $5 ebay laptop with a broken screen that has 20x the performance.
I have an SSD connected to mine which doesn’t need external power and runs fine off the “official” power adapter. The case I have isn’t the greatest (two pieces of acrylic and some stand-offs lol), but it costed 50p and gets the job done.
As for scale, you’re beyond a Pi at that point.
I had the same, but it got corrupted eventually. It seemed it was working fine, but it was impossible to complete smartctl test. I believe that rpi cant handle peak power draw every SSD. That SSD was running fine for 3-4 months and before that I had one running for 2-3 years. I feel like its kinda random and depends on your luck
