I recently bought a domain from Porkbun (thanks to all of the comments on this post!) and I want to self-host some services myself. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and I’m not quite sure if it can handle these things:
- A matrix homeserver
- A lemmy instance
- A website with static HTML pages
- Privacy-respecting frontends (Piped, Redlib etc.)
I am thinking about getting a maxed-out Raspberry Pi 5 with a whole 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Is it worth it? I need a machine that is quiet, doesn’t draw that much power and is overall pretty good for the money.
Edit: I bought this Mini PC instead of the Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks to all the comments!!
Just looked them up, and found products 2x my Pi 5. Maybe there are sales out there?
RPi5, plus a PSU, plus a storage device, plus any extra cooling, plus a case ends up about the same as an N100 without anything extra. For the extra $10 or so, the N100 ends up being the better buy.
Just bought one a month ago. RPi5 was $80 (8gb ram, $60 for 4gb), case with fan was $5 and USB-C PD supply was $10.
Lowest n100 I see is $150. Still, they do look more beefy and probably worth it for some.
A case for $5 is a good find unless you found literally the cheapest thing you could find. For a half decent case I’d expect $10-20, and more if you want something fancy.
What are you doing for storage?
I was weighing the same options recently and went with a n100 mini PC with 8gb RAM and 256GB m.2 SSD for $150. Absolutely no regrets.
I noticed you didn’t list storage with your RPi5. Are you just using eMMC? I’d strongly recommend against eMMC as your only storage if you’re doing anything write-intensive, since the life cycle of eMMC is generally much shorter than even cheap SSDs (and performance is much lower compared to m.2 via PCIe) and it’s not something you can just swap out if it dies. On my existing Pis and other SBCs, I use any eMMC only for the bootloader and/or core OS image (if at all) and store anything else either on physically attached SD cards, SSDs, or mounted network volumes.
This additional storage adds even more cost to the Pi, even if you go with my recommended minimum of a SD card (low life cycle, but at least you can replace it). So now the 8GB Pi is $80 + $10-15 for case with fan and heatsinks + $10-15 for power supply + $15+ for a SD card or other storage = $115-125+ total.
In comparison, the $150 n100 mini PC comes with case, power supply, and storage. Both the included m.2 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM are easily replaced or upgraded using standard SSDs and laptop memory (up to 16GB DDR4-3200). The Intel n100 scores more than twice as high in Passmark compared to the ARM Cortex A76, and includes a full Alder Lake QuickSync engine (meaning it can hardware encode/decode a large variety of video codecs with the integrated GPU including very new and demanding ones like 10-bit AV1). I’ve stress tested it recently and it was capable of simultaneously transcoding 2x 4K HDR movies (both full UHD Blu-ray quality, one of them 60fps and 100Mbps bitrate) with tone mapping in Plex in real time while also doing a full library scan and credit detection. In addition, x86 architecture is still more broadly supported than arm, so compatibility is less an issue. (That said, in this particular case, the n100 is only fully supported in newer Linux kernels. I upgraded Ubuntu 22.04.4 to 6.5 kernel and installed a few other driver packages to get it fully working, which wasn’t hard, but it’s an additional step).
For me, in the end the price difference was at most $25 and the advantages made it clearly worth it.
That said, if all I wanted was a much lower powered SBC just to run a handful of light services, I might look at one of the cheaper Pis or similar and just accept that it’ll eventually die when the eMMC dies (and back up any persistent data I’d want to retain).
I’ve noticed the same thing. Every Intel N100-based machine costs ~200€ on Amazon.
I got a Dell Optiplex for £68 on eBay to replace my pi4b Home Assistant.
It’s running Home Assistant plus a Windows machine Arr stack with Plex and transcoding, a music server, a NAS storage and Adguard at the moment and I still have ram to spare.
What are you using for the NAS enclosure?
Nothing as of yet, just a stack of disks on top of a pc
Ah bummer. I’ve been wanting to retire my mid tower in favor of one of the Optiplex micros that I have but wanted something that could hold the 9 HDDs currently inside of it that wasnt a $1300 NAS but haven’t found a good solution.
I’m sure there will be some kind of rack you can get that is cheaper than $1200
Edit like this https://amzn.eu/d/a75EKlh
Unfortunately I’d need some sort of backplane with it to connect it to the micro PC. I have looked at DAS options but they seem pretty uncommon and mostly relegated to no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon which seems risky due to questionable quality.
I’m not sure what a backplane is, but my HDDs are connected via usb3 cables with power chords. I’m sure there’s speed constraints but it’s what I’ve done.
How does your music server work?
Logitech Media Server aka Squeezebox. It works mostly on plugins. The server runs on almost anything and connects to a client software on a pi in my bedroom and 3 Google Home Minis I have dotted around my house.
It’s a work in progress at the moment. I have it connected to YouTube and Spotify but I’m working on pulling all the music off my old iPod I have in the car, sorting it from the mess Apple made of the files and putting them on my NAS.
Last night I was trying to get LMS to see that music. But alas I couldn’t work out how to mount a Samba share to the container so today I’m gonna be trying FTP instead.
LMS is great but it takes a lot of tinkering to customise to what you want.