Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
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Where I live, electricity is also very expensive. I monitor every watt.
I asked the same question half a year ago, here’s what I’ve learnt: RPis tend to be less reliable and aren’t that energy efficient. They’re great for small appliances, but for servers (e.g. NAS) not as much.
Get an used Thinclient/ mini PC. They cost something between 50-150€ and give you a huge performance boost, more ports, a x86 architecture, are better repairable (still often bad) and more.
Mine uses about 10-15 W on normal use, and 20 rarely when my cloud is under heavy use.
Just curious, why is an x86 architecture a sought after feature in your opinion? My understanding is that ARM is more “bang for your buck” in terms of computation effort to power draw.
I say this because my M2 (ARM based) MacBook does all sorts of heavy lifting and still lasts me more than a day on a single charge compared to my old Intel MacBook running the same services doing the exact same stuff.
Please correct me if I am wrong. I would really appreciate to learn more from people who have more knowledge than I am.
There’s a big shift happening right now, you’re right on that.
Traditionally, ARM is not as capable in solving complex issues, but more efficient.That’s why it has always been used on smartphones for example. You want a lot of battery and don’t need to do highly complex stuff on that, that’s what you have your PC for.
The big focus in the last years has always been to top the competitor in terms of performance, and only right now, people begin to question if the computing power they have right now isn’t enough and if they rather wouldn’t like to have a device that’s more efficient.
The tradeoff is, you’re more limited to this specific architecture. Apple solved this by making a compatibility layer for x86 apps, but that of course comes with a performance hit.I’m no expert in that topic tho, so take all I said with a lil grain of salt.
Right now, I think you’re better off with x86, because your server will definitely run on some sort of Linux, and we don’t have any compatibility layer or something like that yet.
why is an x86 architecture a sought after feature
Software compatibility.
My understanding is that ARM is more “bang for your buck” in terms of computation effort to power draw.
Yes but it’s also usually a small “bang”.
my M2 (ARM based) MacBook does all sorts of heavy lifting
The new Apple silicon is a quantum leap in technology in many ways. Apple managed to make something with desktop-level power and SBC-level efficiency. It’s why they abandoned desktop computers altogether.
The industry is in the process of shifting in that direction but they’re still way behind Apple.
Thank you for your insight, I see your point.
Why do you say they abandoned desktop computers though? Aren’t they still designing and selling iMacs? Aren’t those considered desktop computers?
Well they abandoned desktop processors. The inefficient ones with giant heatsinks.
I upgraded my Plex and *arr server (i3 nuc) with a beelink 12i N100 based mini pc and could not be happier. $167 with 512gb nvme and 16gb RAM. It pulls 6W peak power
Where do people find equipment this cheap? Ya’ll are mind blowing with your ability to score things for such low prices.
Any links?
I’ll recommend the EQ12 instead. Comes with DDR5 and 2x2.5Gb NICs. When on sale it’s ~$200.
Exactly my setup. 2x EQ12 with 32 GB RAM and a standalone network for my Proxmox Cluster. Nice little things.
I’ve been doing computer stuff for a long time and now I have a really dumb question… what’s the benefit of 2x NICs?
In case you don’t have a 2.5gb switch and you daisy chain to a NAS or something?
You can use it as a firewall/router or a VPN gateway and even slap a wireless NIC or two on there and make it a combo router/AP, which can simultaneously play and transcode video as a Plex/Jellyfin server with zero hit to networking performance.
Well I’m no network engineer either but I think the most common use is a VLAN but I believe you can also just connect both to get 5Gb/s.
It looks like it regularly goes on sale that cheap on Amazon, at least in my region:
Is Plex doing any transcoding? That 6w peak is Pi Zero territory! Wow.
Hardware transcoding is highly efficient. The downside is sometimes it introduces artifacting in low resolution live TV.
With Intel QSV enabled it should be able to transcode like 4-6 1080p streams IIRC. Quicksync is very impressive hardware acceleration.
With hardware support enabled it can live transcode four 1080p streams, which my old NUC (5th Gen i3) could also do. The GPU on the NUC could not handle 4k, so it would fall back to using the CPU which would not keep up with a live stream.
The N100 can transcode one 4k HDR with Atmos 7.1 audio and stream in real time. It was just a test, there was a bit of a stutter as it settled in, but I think that might be due to the drive enclosure being connected via USB, so it was storage bandwidth rather than CPU/GPU. The USB ports on the computer are 3.2 gen 2, but the enclosure is only 3.0 at 5Gb/s.
It’s a 6W TDP CPU, but not 6W for power consumption.
At full tilt it’ll be about 25-30W, but typically it’s around 10W for me.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense.
Was wondering what magic was happening to get 6w peak.
Still, 30w peak is pretty nice, especially if you’re idling at 10w.
Hi! Could you please indicate how you manage the system on the beelink? Base OS, how you deal with storage , containers or VMs?
Thanks in advance!!!
Base os is Ubuntu, Plex Media server is installed via apt from Plex repo, *arr services (lidarr, sonarr, radarr, bazaar, sabnzbd) all run on containers which I manage in a docker compose file. Media storage is an external, 4 bay SATA enclosure attached via USB. 4 six terrabyte disk drives in raid 6 on lvm/md, plus a 4tb SSD which is stand alone storage, formatted as btrfs.
I use a N100 Mini PC. They’re very popular for this purpose these days. Mine has 16GB DDR5.
Wait, the N100 supports DDR5?
4 and 5, yes. But only single channel (arbitrary Intel limitation).
Get a mini pc. If you can find a cheap intel NUC on ebay for example. Way more power in a compact form that doesn’t draw that much more power than a rpi… much less four of them.
Or even a thinkcentre, I got mine for less than $300 with 36gb ram, 1tb nvme ssd, and es i9
It was even closer to $200, and I had a plan to make a cluster out of these, but one this thing is powerful enough to do like anything, so I dropped the idea
Edit: also, about the power consumption, it’s very similar to rpi5 and at the same time can do so much stuff
I’ve heard good things about used/refurb HP (elite desk and pro desk) and Lenovo (m700 and m900) mini-pcs. A quick search shows they’re going for ~120-140$ for a quad core with 16 gigs of memory.
That’s what I’ve literally just traded up to from a Pi. Prodesk 600 G3 comes standard with a 6 core i5 8500, has 4 full size ram slots, an m2 ssd slot and has a mount for 3.5” hdd, all drawing only 65w.
There’s a low profile one as well but then you’re stuck with sodimm, no space for a full size hdd and no pci-e slots.
I picked it up second hand for NZD 100 so I imagine it would be even cheaper in the states.
I’ve been looking all over for something in that price range, where did you find them for those prices?
Ebay. Or whatever is your preferred local classified app.
Thank you
Do prefer the Elite Desk though. The Pro only has one drive bay, so you’d have to use an adaptor to use the slim optical bay for a 2.5" drive. The Elite has 2x 3.5" bays and one 2.5" bay plus an NVMe slot so you can build a decent starter NAS. It’s also got 4 DIMM slots for up to 64 GB of memory and if you get a 7th gen Intel with it, it’ll have hardware accelerated transcoding.
Most of my services use a network mounted drive so storage isn’t really a factor (although the more the merrier of course).
My main bottleneck is computation power.
In that case a SFF would be better than either. There are great deals in the used market.
If you are fine with the slim: US amazon.
Bruh, I love you.
Get a cheap SFF desktop, slap some cheap RAM in it and run KVM. It’ll be 10X better than a fleet of Pi’s.
I had budget to try xeon d soc motherboard for a smal itx case. Put 64gb ecc ram into it but could hold 128gb. That server will be 8 yo this year. That particular supermicro mb was ment for some oem routerlike 64_86x with 10g ports and remote management. I’m not sure if intel or amd have any cpus in that segment anymore, but it’s very light on wattage if mostly idle/maintaining vms.
One option I’m looking at is to get a dedicated hetzner server, even the auction and lowest grade ‘new’ offerings are pretty good for the price if you account for energy costs and upfront gear cost.
There’s the Orange Pi 5 Plus if you want something really energy efficient. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8 core CPU, dual 2.5G ethernet, and it can use an M.2 2280 SSD. It looks like there’s going to be a 32GB version, but it’s not available yet.
That looks very sexy, what’s the price range on those?
The 16GB version is around $160 US with a 256GB eMMC module and case.
At this price point, why are RPi’s even a thing? Wow!
Established ecosystem, I’d guess. Also brand recognition. I mean, you can tell that this one is also called “some fruit name” PI, for good reason.
Valid point, I see where you are coming from.
More and more people are asking that question every day. Especially with the company going public.
I‘d just get an old computer. My server runs my whole homelab with 4 spinning disks, 2 ssds while having 10+ services. It takes 50 watts since it is pretty old but it works well. If I turned off the spinning disks it might be even lower.
It takes 50 watts since it is pretty old
I bet most of the power is used by spinning disks. My setup (diy desktop) used 22W with 3 SSDs, but after replacing one SSD with 3.5" HDD it went up to 35W
Jeez! Thats quite a lot! Thanks for mentioning.
How do you monitor your wattage?
With Shelly Plus Plug S
If you don’t already use it, zram swap is great for providing a little bit extra oomph. If your server doesn’t have a lot of compressed data in memory, it can literally more than double your effective ram.
Doesn’t swap reduce the lifespan of storage though?
Zram swap is basically this: Turn all of your free ram into a swapdisk. Compress all access to that swapdisk.
So, it’s not using you storage, buy your memory. Most stuff in memory is usually highly uncompressed - so it compresses really well.
Instead of getting the additional space from disk, it’s getting it from compression.
Can you please explain to me the difference? How does a swapdisk compare to RAM? I don’t mind googling it but I highly doubt I’ll get a straightforward ELI5 style answer from there.
I would really appreciate it if you can elaborate, if you have the time that is.
Thank you.
Basically zram is compression inside ram
There are two types of computer memory that fundamentally matter on the consumer level:
- memory, as in RAM, which is like short-term memory in people, or how much you can think about at once. It is blanked when the computer restarts. It is very fast.
- drive storage, as in hdd or ssd space. This is like long-term memory or overall knowledge capacity, and persists across boots. It is comparatively slow.
Solid state disk storage, and in particular some SD cards, can be vulnerable to excessive writes.
Ram, however, is not impacted by the number of uses.
A swap file works like this: When memory gets full, you move the least-used parts onto the swap file.
A normal swapfile is on-disk. When memory gets close to full, the system moves some onto the (much much slower, like 10-1000x) on-disk swapfile.
Zram swap creates a compressed swapfile out of your free memory. A file in linux does not have to be on a hard disk/ssd, it just has to look and quack like a file. When memory gets close to full, the system copies some onto the in-memory compressed file. This is very fast, but uses some cpu. It doesn’t touch your drive storage.
That is a great explanation. It makes perfect sense to me know. Thank you
It just compresses your ram contents so you can fit more stuff in memory at once
Minisforum makes good basic SFF PCs for super cheap.
Your best option would probably be to buy a refurbished office PC that has at least 16 gb of RAM.
Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GCX4JKJ
That way you get a bunch of memory in a decent system for cheap, and you’re only using up one port on your switch.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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I had Plex in my name first!
Lol 😂
I use a quartz64 from pine. Back when it came out it was beefier than the rpi4. With the 5 that has now changed but it still is a great little machine.
My instance runs on it aswell as my other webservices (A Homepage, cgit instance and a small blog). Handles everything really well with the 8GiB of RAM.
Setup is a bit of a pain, especially because I had the urge to run gentoo on it. Compile times are actually acceptable.
It costs 80 bucks, which is really acceptable.
Edit: Forgot to mention energy efficiancy, ARM is unbeaten by x86 in that department. People on here recommend old PCs a lot, which, depending on your local energy prices could quiet quickly void the savings made by buying it. Also it has a SATA port, which requires some tinkering with the Devicetree to get running but allowed me to use an old 1TB SSD i had in the house.
The Quartz64 is good but to slow to do anything to complicated. You can pickup minipcs for the same price that will have way more performance but will still draw only a few watts.
But any old PC that is x86. Even if it second hand/refurbished (as long as it’s a branded pc Like HP, Levono).
