I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?
Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?
I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.
The only reason SBCs were ever relevant is because of the excellent pricing, which has now been matched by used x86 computers. That and if the SBC had an open-source design/implementation (open schematics on RISC-V)
Not just the pricing, but also the low footprint, tiny size and fanlessness.
Low power too. I replaced a x86 server with 3 PIs in a k8s setup for about half the wattage.
What happened is that people realized what I’ve been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , https://lemmy.world/comment/4696545
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:
- They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a “computer”? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we’re seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi’s market.
- Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn’t ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires… more adapters;
- Price-wise it doesn’t make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point… and way more stable with more expansion.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox
Proxmox isn’t a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven’t discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.
The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.
Quite the teardown fair play
Do you think the used server market is worth the cost? It looks like I could have a giant chunk of DDR3 for not so much.
I don’t (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.
Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.
If you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you’re interested.
Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.
Another thing to consider: you’re trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.
Thank you, really appreciate your advice. I was just struggling to install Proxmox on a new machine, and you made me take a step back. The kernel is messed up, do I really want this? Why am I jumping through hoops for this when Debian has zero issues installing? I’ll be trying the container software you mentioned instead.
I’ve done the same thing as the person you replied to is suggesting for around 10 years now. It works very well for a home user because parts etc are readily available. Most hypervisors will run on x86/amd64 hardware without issue. Check out something other than proxmox. LXC is one suggestion. If you’re going to stick with Debian look into SAMBA with BIND to ensure ease of sharing and cross platform integration.
Another reason to not get an old server is power, noise and thermals. They’re designed to live in an air conditioned room. Anyone who works in server rooms for any length of time will tell you to wear ear protection.
The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It’s just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.
I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.
But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it’s only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That’s at least double than rpis
But idle still would run much more than 15w
This isn’t true.
- HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
- Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
- Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W
Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.
Removed by mod
Your Pi runs all that?! I’ve setup Homeassistant on a Tinkerboard and it’s slow as shit with nothing else running. :(
Not sure what kind of tinker board you’re working with, but the power of Pis has increased exponentially through its generations. There are tasks that would run slowly on a dedicated Pi2 that ran easily in parallel with a half dozen other things on a Pi4.
The older ones can still be useful, just for less intensive tasks.
I’m just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.
Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.
Pi 4’s were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5’s are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.
Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it’s easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a ‘real’ computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn’t even increase the electric bill.
For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, ‘smart home’ technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don’t need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi’s make sense, but I’m more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.
SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I’m still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.
This is how I feel.
I would much rather have a single machine running vms which I can easily snapshot and back up rather than a dozen small machines I have to deal with power supplies and networking.
SBCs have specific use cases, usually where they need to interact with hardware. That’s what made the rpi so great with it’s GPIO and hats. But that’s a rather small use case.
My pi4 8gb is awful as a jellyfin client am I doing something wrong? Pi OS, and just using Firefox to watch. CPU/GPU were maxed out, ram usage like 1gb
Which codecs do you have in your library? Also which resolution/bitrate?
Also, have a look at Kodi as a client.
My guess is Firefox. I’m using Kodi - OSMC/libreelec - and it coasts along at 1080p, with plenty of spare CPU to run pihole and some environmental monitors. Haven’t tried anything 4k, but supposedly Pi4 offloads that to hardware decoding and handles it just fine. (as long as the codec is supported).
huh? What happened? Who’s shitting on ARM?
man reads few comments on the internet.
man takes it literally.
Anxiety sets in
ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ
If you’re not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.
I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.
Don’t bin them, sell them
Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.
2 - 8 watts of power for a Pi vs 9-150watts for an x86 system. There are definitely use-cases.
I use a Pi for DHCP, DNS with PiHole, Tailscale Subnet Router, Rustdesk server, Vaultwarden, Syncthing (connects to local device shares, rather than run ST on each device), ArchiveBox, and working on instant messaging (maybe SimpleX, not sure yet). It’s kind of maxed out.
But all this runs under 8watts (actually it’s so low my smart switch doesn’t even register the consumption).
Uh, my server is an x86, is fanless and the cpu idles at 9 and maxes at 12. Is much faster then my pi and has quicksync.
I run plex, jellyfin, smb shares, mealie, tailscale and rerouting, notes, and books.
I like my pi but performance per watt isn’t as drastic with x86 if you build for it. Did I mention it’s also fanless? Passive heating that just works on the cpu.
Nice!
Yea, I’ve been eyeing a box like that, looks like it could be useful.
Yep, it’s all tradeoffs, gotta know what you’re shooting for. My Pi cost $5, I’m using an old phone charger (I have many), and an old microsd. If anything fails, I just grab another from the junk box.
All I know with my current use-case is I can’t measure the power consumption with the tools I use. I imagine that means under 5w draw (not really sure what it’s capable of measuring).
New X86 processors are as efficient as the Apple M series. They are far more power efficient than a Pi under load, though they will consume slightly more at idle. But not nearly as much as you’re suggesting.
I thought this was about FIFA
A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn’t shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you’re literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.
Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC’s from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.
I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.
I have a microserver and various pis ( zero w, 2x 3b+ and a pi b)
With the exception of the zero w they are all still in action.
The pi b connects to the pi touchscreen and displays photos from a directory every 5 minutes.
The 2x3bs are running kodi to stream from my server.
The zero w was a camera recording and streaming 24/7 but I stopped it as I wanted to do other stuff with it.
I kept buying Pi Zero Ws, hats and phats then put them all in a drawer cos I couldn’t decide what to do with them. I think I’ve got about 7 or 8. I really should do something with them.
pwnagotchi family
Link for the lurkers https://github.com/evilsocket/pwnagotchi
Pwnagotchi is an A2C-based “AI” leveraging bettercap that learns from its surrounding WiFi environment to maximize the crackable WPA key material it captures (either passively, or by performing authentication and association attacks). This material is collected as PCAP files containing any form of handshake supported by hashcat, including PMKIDs, full and half WPA handshakes.
Holy shit!! I didn’t know I needed this. I’m so building some - thank you! 👍
I am nearly complete migrating my ceph cluster and nomad compute cluster to arm :shrug:
