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?
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
I gave up on using raspberry pi for running servers.
I ended up buying a $60 lenovo on ebay https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-tiny-guide-and-ce-review/2/ and then loaded it up with 32GB of ram. Now I run a proxmox hypervisor and around 20+ containers/VMs. Best decision I ever made. I just spin up servers willy nilly
If you don’t need GPIO then run a hypervisor. Cheaper than SBCs and more useful.
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?
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.
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
Do they have a fan that will get noisy after a while?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
