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?
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).
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.
The Orange Pi 5 or Orange Pi 3 LTS are solid options, depending on your budget and how much horsepower you need.
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.
2nd this - great way to have tons of flexibility
I have a similar setup but with a lenovo tiny pc.
Another advantage is that I no longer have to worry about sd cards randomly dying
Intel NUC running Ubuntu.
This is what I use but with Debian. I had an older NUC 8 i5 lying around so I decided to drop 32GB of RAM and a new 1TB NVME drive into it. The performance is way better than a Pi and the measured power consumption at the wall socket is under 5 watts idle (peaks at around 13-15 watts under load if I recall correctly).
In terms of noise level, if I start loading the CPU heavily the fan can be noticeable … however at idle or when it’s just streaming Plex content to my TV (without transcoding), it doesn’t make any fan noises at all.
Old laptop or PC. I use an intel NUC for mine. Hosting 30 docker containers
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
$80?? I got the 5 LTS maybe a year+ ago for $45… and this was when things were REALLY out of stock.
The 5 just came out this year and I don’t think it has an LTS model. Are you sure you didn’t get a 3 LTS or a 4 LTS?
Hahahaha! I checked my records and it indeed was a 3 LTS. My memory may have been fuzzy as I ended up not keeping it
rock64 works pretty good for my use case as a 700 mbit router.
I’ve heard good things about the rockpi.
I’ve got a Rock64 running OpenMediaVault with about 6-10 Docker containers. Works great and the power consumption is very minimal (~1A).
That’s honestly pretty impressive. Well done.
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%.
I can’t get a usb webcam working on rock64. Just a heads up, the software support is very poor.
Lots of cheep SFF/thin client machines on eBay.
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
Do they have a fan that will get noisy after a while?
I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab
Works great.
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.
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.
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.
Hard for a “layperson”, maybe. But IMHO for someone interested in self-hosting this probably should not be a hard problem to solve, or at least a decent “warmup exercise” to see if you’d like it.
I say this because you don’t even need to write the script yourself, there are plenty of preexisting applications that can be configured to notify you of updates to an RSS feed.
I’m sure I could whip that up in changedetection.io or Node-RED pretty quickly, for example.
I don’t use a dedicated RSS feed reader app, but I’d also be somewhat surprised if there isn’t one that supports some form of push notifications.
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.
Power wise you are absolutely correct. It is not the best performance value anymore. However, support for the Pi4 is much more robust when using them in specific projects designed to use them.
For everything else I have a much beefier Unraid server that hosts all of my dockers and VMs.
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.
Thin client! They’re significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage, I’ve had sd cards go bad in pis
a cheap second hand laptop will be both faster and will have better wattage and what is basically an internal UPS
alternatively any used thin client will do well to. Cost around 50 bucks and has waaaay more power than a pi while not consuming much more.
i prefer the laptop due to impossibility of a brown out / blackout affecting it. it is basically an active ups
That’s true - as long as the battery does not catch fire :D
Are you using any charging utility? Like Macbooks are drawing power from Power brick as long as the battery is full. Still they are sometimes discharging to around 50% to keep the cells alive.
nah laptops in the last 5 years have features like that so you dont need to worry about all that. most have them in the bios too so no weird software needed
Aliexpress has some reasonably affordable fanless mini PCs. Not quite as low power but you can run a heap of containers on them since they are more powerful and x86 and some of them have multiple ethernet ports which can be useful for router purposes etc
