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?

  • nocaptchaforme@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • marsokod@lemmy.world
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    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
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      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.

    • orangeboats@lemmy.world
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      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
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        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
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        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!

    • blaine@kbin.social
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      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
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          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%.

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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    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

  • Notorious@lemm.ee
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    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
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      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.

    • saucyloggins@lemmy.world
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      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
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        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.

  • unixorn@readit.buzz
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    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
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    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.

  • brotherballan@lemmy.one
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    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.

  • Skeletor@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hi SirPyschoMantis,

    I’m certainly no expert but just recently started a similar project you are describing. I went with a used HP ProDesk 400 G2 mini. It has a i5-6500t, 8GB and 250GB ssd.

    I run Ubuntu server on it with docker. It’s compact and capable of running a bit more then a Raspberry Pi I believe.

    When searching for a Pi alternative I also came across a similar mini pc from Dell. Thats was a Dell OptiPlex 3040 SFF.

    I’m from the Netherlands and used prices here were around 100-150 €.

    • xyguy@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      Second this, but don’t go for the dell minis. I have had trouble with them no recognizing 3rd party power supplies that are often shipped with refurb units.

      I’ve had good luck with the lenovo tiny PCs.

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com
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    1 year ago

    Look for secondhand thin clients such as HP T620. They’re usually can be had for $30 or less (or more) depending on the configuration. They also have low power usage, not as low as a pi, but still low enough (<10 W).

  • LaudemPax@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Thin Clients are the way to go! I got a Dell Wyse 5010 for cheap on ebay and replaced the internal 8 GB DOM memory with a 1TB SSD so it’s basically a NAS now.

    It does take a little DIY (video) but after that it runs more performant than RPis I’ve had in the past