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.
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.
I bought a dozen of pi4 when they were so cheap but i actually dont know what exactly to do with them. I actually would love some ideas
I had the same question few days back here
I’m more lost reading this hahaha
The next pi I get will be turned into an MT32-Pi for use with my Mister retro setup and classic PC games.
https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi
It can also be used as a midi synth if you’re into that
Hell yeah! I had bought a front end called lunchbox a long time ago but i havent got to install moonlight streaming either :) for midis that’s an awesome idea too. Maybe one raspberry PI for all music stuff… thats one way to organise things too
I am nearly complete migrating my ceph cluster and nomad compute cluster to arm :shrug:
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity k8s Kubernetes container management package
16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #449 for this sub, first seen 24th Jan 2024, 01:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have a pi which I use as an apple tv/firestick alternative which works very well and would be pretty pointless with a larger pc imo. Servers I dont do with small PIs but indeed old computers. I think all kinds of ultra movable devices will be good with PI and derivatives.
For folks that want to get into it: pine64 is open source but I havent tried it yet. Thinking of it though. They even have a watch.
The two things to keep in mind with pine64 is that they ship hardware before the software is ready and because they are less popular there is less support.
I like there hardware but its just something to keep in mind. The good news is that to my knowledge all of their single board computers can run regular linux.
Thanks for mentioning that. Iirc they use risc-v chips and linux supports it so it should work I guess. Will check it out.
If you are unsure what to get definitely don’t get Risc-v as the user land software is not well supported.
I would get a rockpro64
I‘m hearing mixed things about risc-v. Its community supported. Do you have experience with the shortcomings?
The main shortcoming is that the software hasn’t matured yet. Its true you could use Debian or Gentoo and get a decent machine but I would hold off using it for anything important. You won’t find Risc-V images on docker hub and flathub only barely has arm support.
Got it. So except the OS, software is going to be pretty tough. Would that mean installing from source still works or not?
It should
deleted by creator
I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there’s someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.
My x86 Proxmox consumes about 0.3 kwh a day at around 15% average load. I’ve only had the Kill A Watt on it for a day, so I don’t know how accurate that is, but it shouldn’t be too far off.
How bad is it?
My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.
I’m considering a TrueNAS box running either 2.5" ssd’s or NVME sticks (My storage target is under 8TB, and that’s including 3 years projected growth).
deleted by creator
Holy crap! I have a n100 SFF that consumes 5-6 w idle (with WiFi on) and I have an old i5 (gen 6 I think) that consumes 30 at idle. Your rig is defiantly not meant to act as a server (unless you want to mine bitcoons or run boinc…)
Lol, yea, it’s old, was built for performance, and hasn’t run right in a while.
I’m looking to setup a NAS and turn that thing off
How bad is it? My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.
That’s very bad haha. Most home servers for personal use are using 7-10w.
Although you’ll have to do the math with your local energy prices to determine how important that is. It’s probably not.
It’s $1/day. I’ve done the math a few times
$1/day? At 100W average power usage, that’s 2.4kWh per day, suggesting that where you live, the price is 41.67 cents per kWh,
roughly double that of California.Is electricity that expensive where you live?
Edit: it’s been a while since I lived in the Bay area, I hadn’t realized that the electricity price now ranges from 38-62 cents per kWh, depending on rate plan and time.
Yeah so you’d make your money back pretty quickly picking up a dedicated PC for that.
Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.
Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.
Depends on what your server is running. Multiple GPUs, HDDs, and other fun items start to add up to well over 100W. I justify it by using it to keep my 3d printer filament dry.
If you have multiple GPUs in your home server you’re probably doing it wrong. But even then, at idle, with no displays connected, the draw will be surprisingly low.
Most systems with some ssd/NVMe, 2-4 DIMMs and maybe a drive or two should idle closer to 50w-60w.
Agreed, don’t do what I do if you value your power bill. To be fair, my network switch pulls more power than my cobbled together server anyhow.
If you’re getting two gaming PCs out of one hypervisor, you might be doing it right.
Newer CPU’s tend to use a good chunk more power under low loads than some older ones. Going from 1st Gen. Ryzen to 2nd Gen. got me about 20 watts higher total system power draw with my use case. And 3rd Gen. is even worse.
Intel is MUCH worse at it than AMD, but every Gen. AMD keeps cranking up those boost clocks and power draw and it really can make a difference at low to mid range loads.
My Ryzen 3000 based system uses about 90 watts at “idle” with all my stuff running and the hard drives on.
It’s probably more about aggressive default bios speeds. Tweak your c states / bios overclocking / pcie power management / windows power management features. Idle power has gone down on most chips.
The Ryzen 3000 should truly idle closer to 20-30w.
That is after tweaking bios settings. Originally I was at around 100 watts, now I’m closer to 80.
Keep in mind that’s with a bunch of hard drives, and it’s not a 100% idle, more of a 90% idle which is where modern “race to idle” CPUs struggle the most.
Nothing to be done. It’s old. Only fan to adjust is cpu, and I can tell when the cooler is getting dirty because the fan stays at higher speeds.
Otherwise there’s one large, slow rpm fan in the case, always on low speed.
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
Man who sits upside on toilet.
Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.
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 missed this sentiment. Just bought my first RPI (5) and it’s a neat little toy. I have some pretty specific requirements I’ll have to work toward but I like tinkering with it. The size, price and low power consumption beat any of the mini PCs I found. Then again I’m probably out of the loop
I’m the same. Took my sweet time getting my Pi5 and now I’m a zealot!
I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
Fuck, if you can’t figure out what to do with them, give them to me and I will! There’s so many fun art projects you can get up to with Pis.
I say bin them. Throw them into the ocean
Username checks out
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
SBC (specifically RPis) got more expensive. x86 got more powerful, more importantly more efficient, and cheaper. Also X86 has more software built for it than ARM.
There are a few X86 SBCs now though.
If you already have SBCs and they’re doing what you need, I see no reason to switch.
