I've never been very moved by the pi line for "non-maker" "server-type" stuff. Personally, I run a 4GB RockPro64 [0] in the NAS case [1]. Add a heatsink [2] and a beefier 5A power supply [3] just in case I ever want to add spinning drives. But for now I just use an NVMe adapter [4]. That's $148 total.

For $15 you can add Bluetooth and Wifi [5] if you really want. Instead I chose to treat myself to $21-$40 worth of eMMC5 storage for the OS [6].

[0] $80 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-4gb-single-board-comput... [1] $45 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-metal-desktop-nas-casin... [2] $4 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-30mm-tall-profile-heats... [3] $13 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-12v-5a-us-power-supply/... [4] $6 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-x4-to-m-2-ngff-nv... [5] $15 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-1x1-dual-band-wifi-802-... [6] https://pine64.com/product/16gb-emmc-module/?v=0446c16e2e66

> I've never been very moved by the pi line for "non-maker" "server-type" stuff.

I love raspberry pis but pi-mania is absolutely out of control. I can't count how many $100+ programmer hours I have seen wasted waiting for a $10 pi to boot, build, or generally stop being slow. I have witnessed the deep shame of a multi-million dollar exhibition center-featuring a RPi kiosk deployed in front of customers that chugs so hard the sales team takes shifts intercepting people before they can poke at it and realize how much of a dog it is. But at least they saved $200 on not using a laptop, right?

If you want to dip your toes in the hardware world from the comfort of ubuntu at impulse buy prices, pis are great, but they stop making sense very quickly once you exit that specialized vertical.

Phoronix did a reasonable comparison of an Rpi4 to a Celeron G5900 and it does a pretty good job of showing why a Pi isn't a great (even low end) general purpose option. Not disputing it's usefulness in other spaces...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberr...

The only interesting thing about that comparison is that the Pi did pretty well in the single real-world software benchmark Phoronix did (something to do with LibreOffice and pdfs), where it was 59% the speed of the Celeron G5900, and it managed that with an SD card rather than proper USB 3 storage.

"It's not as fast as a new Intel processor" is not new information...

I’m guilty of this. I use Pis for industrial use monitoring some machinery’s serial output and being a server for it. I know the SD cards will eventually get corrupted from power cycling and I’ll have to come fix them. But the alternative is buying a bunch of $250-500 industrial arm computers sight unseen, with a tiny fraction of the support and reviews that Pis have so it feels like a shot in the dark.

The MLC and SLC cards for industrial use are not that bad. Regular sd cards TLC will break quicker. I use pi's for exhibitions at work, with great success for a few years, as well as for digital signage screens.

I think ARM is cool and have a few SBCs around for various projects, but... for ~$150, you can get an entire (used) PC, with a Skylake i5 and 8GB of RAM (in addition to the case, power supply, etc). There's just so much more you can do with that, so unless you need ARM, there isnt a lot of point. Even with expensive electricity, the Pi will save you maybe $1/month.

Example eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-OPTIPLEX-7040-SFF-DESKTOP-INTE... (no storage drive on this, but it has NVME, so for $50 you can add more storage than many use cases need, and it'll be much faster and more durable than SBC eMMC or SD solutions).

Yep I recently picked up a used slim HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF i5-4590 Quad Core 3.3GHz 16GB RAM / 240GB SSD With Win 10 Pro for $150..

And it literally was in lightly used (basically perfect) shape and no issues at all.. they even threw in a cheap WiFi dongle.

It’s amazing what you can get on eBay for value as far a large used computers go.. obviously it’s YMMV as far as the seller you happen to buy from and the condition of the item you receive.. but for me, this machine was super awesome and fast (I hadn’t bought or built a desktop PC in at least 10 years prior to this)...

This is interesting also. Maybe I need to do the math and compare potential electric bills.

You can get an i3 with 8G, passively cooled in a VESA format enclosure with wifi and ethernet for sub $200 on aliexpress.

I use a second-hand HP t620 thin client instead.

4 x64 AMD Puma cores at 1.5GHz, dual-channel DDR3 4GB SODIMM (1600MT/s), 16GiB m.2 storage, mPCIe, gigabit ethernet, 6x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0. 7W in idle and it's fast enough to run Gentoo. I paid 25 EUR for it. You can expand RAM (up to 16GiB) and storage if you wish for a little bit more.

PC recycling companies buy these by weight and there is very little in terms of secondary market. Most of these end up in landfills, while being perfectly capable little home servers.

https://heap.ovh/home-server-upgrade-to-hp-t620.html

Wow this is eye opening. I appreciate the links, I will look into this!

This looks interesting.

Would it be any good with a bunch of H265 5mp cameras hanging off it?

I want to put security cameras around my house, but naturally I want to DIY.

You're probably going to want something with H265 acceleration, which most ARM servers lack as I understand it.

Intel QuickSync for H265 might be what you're looking for; should be able to find a few 7th gen processors that support it.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

Thanks

Go to serverbuilds.net

That site is honestly incredible.

Awesome, thank you!

>>Because I want to leave this on 24/7 and run various cron jobs etc, so I want the low-power ARM chip.

But the Pi4 can use as much as 15W, it has left the realm of "low powered" devices long time ago.

I have a very old(2013) HP workstation that I use as a NAS, with a 2nd gen i5, and when running it uses 20W of power, measured by myself.

It can use as much as 15W under heavy load, but most of my Pi 4-based projects seem to idle around 3-5W.

> "...most of my Pi 4-based projects seem to idle around 3-5W."

Some current Intel NUC models can manage less than 5W idle power as well, e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15571/intel-nuc10i7fnh-frost-... but don't have the limitations of the Pi.

Have newer versions of these things improved? Our company bought a new round of NUC7s and NUC5s and life span was pretty abysmal.

I still use a NUC5i3RYH every day. It has been remarkably stable, haven't had to replace a single part or have any issues since building it in 2015, and makes an outstanding Hackintosh to boot.

Either I got lucky with the two I own, or your environment was to harsh for them?

Hmm that's really really surprising if thats the case. According to the spec sheet [1], its TDP is 95W. RAM itself is 3W each, the cooling fans is easily 5W, the CPU cooling fan should be another 10W-20W. Would love to learn the configuration that gives you 20W power usage total. To put into perspective, my mac M1 uses 20Wish normally for regular usage.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52207/i...

I just got a "1 Liter Form Factor" HP DeskPro 405 G6 Mini that measures about 175x175x35mm (7x7x1.4 inches). AMD Ryzen 7 4750GE PRO (Zen 2) that has a base 3.1GHz clock for eight cores (4.3GHz all boost) which is an APU with eight Radeon GPU cores, in which I DIY added in 64GB of memory, and a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro.

With the Intel AX200 WiFi 6 and BT 5.0 disabled, it idles at barely 12W. Running a bunch of virtualized loads (nothing crazy) in XCP-NG, it's consistently under 20W despite no matter what's running on it. If I had it going flat out (with a 5GbE NIC plugged in via USB Type-C) under something like heavy video rendering (CPU+GPU+storage) loads it peaks at about 48-50W.

We're entering an era of pretty fantastic power consumption, especially if you shy further away from Intel SKUs at the moment. The Intel SKUs are pretty frugal, but the AMD ones genuinely sip power and are only getting better.

[1]

TDP is worst case sustained heat output for selecting heatsinks, not representative of typical consumption at all. Typical CPU fans are also like 12V/0.25A max with power variable between 50 to 100% or so. 20W idle is thus very believable for a build by a sane person[2].

1: https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/CPUs/tr-1950x/...

2: Personally I often end up with more substantial configurations like 12V/1.5A 80mm with couple 12V/1A as sides but my suspicion is my lack of sanity is a huge contributor to that

I run ThrottleStop on windows with everything set to minimum, so the CPU is pretty much running locked to 800mhz - absolutely enough for a NAS.

> its TDP is 95W

So AMD and Intel measure TDP differently because obviously they do.

Intel's TDP is based on the max the CPU can generate while AMD is based on what an average user would encounter.

You've got it the wrong way around there. AMD is much more conservative.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319402-intels-desktop-...

"It’s easy to see why Intel hasn’t changed the way it defines or communicates TDP to its customers: It would make the company’s high end look vastly worse compared with AMD. A Core i9-10850K will draw up to 265W. If you want an AMD CPU with that kind of power budget you have to buy a Threadripper."

Intel's TDP is more based on the max the CPU would draw, when all the various Turbo modes are disabled. Which reflects approximately zero real-world deployments except for the very low-end parts where Intel disables the Turbo modes for product segmentation.

In the video linked below at 6:55 he says the PI can consume up to 10 watts at peak. Referencing the Raspberry pi documentation^1 it says that the PI 4 consumes 600mA of power at typical bare board consumption. Looking at intel Ark^2 for a i5 sandy bridge shows a TDP of 95W. So it has the capability of pulling far more watts. Sure the Intel computer is much more powerful than the PI 4, but just as your computer is only using 20 watts of power in a NAS setting, the pi will probably be pulling far less than 10watts, especially when idling. So while not the lowest power you can get, still an incredible amount ratio for performance to power. I suspect that for a pi4 running 24/7 with cron jobs, the wattage will be far lower than what an older intel CPU would pull, but this is just a theory, I'd have to have the parts myself to test it out

1.https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... 2. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52207/i...

The author discusses power requirements / power supply considerations of pi 4 + nvme at 6:44:

https://youtu.be/4Womn10v71s

its worth noting raspberry pis have no real power management too. i mean the cpu governors can down clock saving bulk of energy, but you cannot turn off cores

Look into Serve The Home's Project TinyMiniMicro: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

If you're not too picky about specs, eBay will give you one of these nodes for around $200, although you might have to supply the NVMe.

Have you considered recycling a thin client?

This website gather specs on them and you can find used ones as low as 20 bucks on eBay. Many will draw 10-20 watts, like a Raspberry.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t510/

Or quite a few Chromeboxes can be wiped and run Linux (though it's worth doing a little homework, some at least need to be popped open to have their dev-mode screw pulled like this[1]). Certainly options for less than $100 on eBay.

1: https://dareneiri.github.io/Asus-Chromebox-With-Full-Linux-I...

Both my HP t520 and Fujitsu Futro S720 idle at 6W (with the audio codec powered down), measured at the wall.

Intel NUCs are IMHO exceptionally nice and fit your requirements, with some little caveats. Besides, it's a much more powerful machine and it will be easier to run till ARM becomes more popular. With some tweaks, in my experience it can use 3-4 W, so it might be able to replace a Pi in some scenarios.

You might go slightly over budget with an i3 (unless you shop for a deal). You need to install a NVMe yourself, as well as RAM. The i3 can be run in a silent mode, but there are some third party cases around which let you go fanless. I don't understand why Intel is not selling a fanless NUC with an i3 / m3. There's a lot of potential. Same for AMD.

Make sure and keep some air duster around. After 4 years, we had some schizing out because of intake cake.

I'll tack on one more wish, if we're building a NUC-like: Ship with an SD card in it that contains only the Pi boot blobs and a build of the edk2 firmware so that the system boots to UEFI and then acts like a normal computer that can boot standard OS images and not need special images with the Pi's insane boot sequence programmed into them.

My Asus PN50 w/R7-4800U gets me 8C/16T for 10W, NVME SSD and SATA SSD - no noise most of the time, very faint fan noise under load. Even suspends / resumes well under Linux - coupled with Wake on Lan - it's close to Pi level power usage and acoustics.

Costs fair bit more than $200 though?

You can get a 4C one for $329 w/o memory and disks - not cheap but I was merely trying to point out that x86 can do low power with great performance now a days.

The joke with the Raspberry Pi is that it is 1) so cheap because its manufactured on an old silicon node but of course that implies 2) it actually uses a ton of power compared to a chip made in 7nm.

From what I could find the RPi chips are made in 27nm, and while you can't exactly linearly extrapolate from that, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a 7nm smartphone chip can get you the same performance as the RPi at 1/3rd the power consumption.

Rpi 4 is 28nm, earlier models are 40nm.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-...

Just get a low-end intel box that is not a nuc. It doesn't have to be a nuc, try one of the zotac fanless machines, which is low power because of thermals.

I think once AMD spools up with 7nm we'll have machines like this with even lower power.

For a similar use case I ended up with a Lenovo "nano" desktop. The IoT models are designed to be run continuously and, uh, it runs Windows too which I guess is a bonus. $300+ on sale.

These look really cool. Unfortunately, I can't seem to configure one without Windows.

It should be a nominal task to install Ubuntu on top of it, worst comes to worse it doesn't work and you send it back to Best buy.

I am not concerned about the effort of installing Ubuntu. I prefer to not pay the extra money for Windows, however little it might be. I already have other Windows computers.

Is this a moral argument, it would cost you more to find a specific Linux laptop in most cases.

It definitely works with Ubuntu

You can buy Intel NUC that does way more than wimpy RPI. Remember, RPI is not opensource which is how most people see them as - aka, a feel good company. It is as proprietary as Intel in the critical areas (processor, sdk and bunch of binary blobs).

RPI really doesn't belong in this type of a device you're describing.

In my case being open source is a bonus - what I want is an on-premise modern linux environment that is economical to leave running 24/7, executes reasonably fast (including disk IO), and secure (auto update etc).

I solved that by buying a passively cooled baytrail nano-ITX motherboard 5 or so years ago, and running Arch linux on it. At the time, pis were way slower at disk IO and encryption/hashing. Maybe the pi 4 is fast enough now, but I suspect the baytrail is still holding up favorably.

What would?

PinePhone.

https://pine64.org

New batch due soon.

Upvote for the interesting idea (fellow PinePhone user), but see my other comment - The RockPro64 (also from Pine64) is probably a better fit since it's a SBC with PCIe and thus the ability to plug in NVMe which the OP was asking for.

Just buy a NUC. I just bought a nuc, 2nd hand off eBay, the CPU supposedly has a 5W TDP... Adding a disk (WD Green?) it's probably going to stay below 10W

I've been looking at NUCs recently, but I can't decide how much compute power I should aim for. What NUC did you buy?

Intel NUC DE3815TYKE, Atom E3815, for about 50€ shipped.

It's got a DDR3 ram slot and can host 8GB ram, along with a sata port and a slot for a 2.5" disk. It also has 4GB of on-board storage that I really don't care about.

The processor is a single-core atom that clocks at about 1.4GHz with a TDP of about 5W.

I don't really care much about speed for this machine because it will become a home vpn gateway running PFSense. The CPU has AES-NI instruction, and that's what convinced me to get it.

My current vpn gateway is a Dell Optiplex FX160 which is still an atom and performs okay-ish, but has got no AES-NI and no internal storage beyond a dumb 2GB disk-on-module, on which pfsense barely fits and consumes about ~17 Watts powered on.

I've tested plenty at work and don't really have any complaints with any of them, worst case they will perform as well as an equivalent laptop and usually better due to more thermal headroom.

If you're optimizing for price and power consumption get an older SKU with an Atom, if you want more horsepower anything 10th gen with 4 cores will handle just about anything you can throw at it, and the idle power consumption is quite good too.

> I want to leave this on 24/7 and run various cron jobs etc, so I want the low-power ARM chip.

You can find Atoms and Celerons (e.g. N3060) just as low power (5W). Plenty of such low-power mini PCs are available. Ones with 128GB are well within your price range... here's just one for $158: https://amazon.com/dp/B08T71WXL3

Or you can go with one of the few which include M.2 slots... I have a couple, myself.

Amazon and Minisforum are good places to start.

I know you said it's too time consuming, but it took me less than 15 minutes to get mine up and running with the Argon40 case.

Argon40 has a M.2 (SATA B and M keys) to USB 3 addon part as well. So if you have a Pi4 that has already been configured to boot from USB, this is a drop in part.

I find that my Pi4 has trouble maxing out the USB3 and SATA M.2 SSD's throughput. NVMe seems like overkill.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/ - Argon ONE V2 Raspberry Pi 4 Case for the RasPi 4

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP/ - Argon ONE M.2 Raspberry Pi SSD Board

What I like about this case is that the entire case acts like a heatsink for the CPU and Ram... and the internal daughterboard provides full size HDMI ports.

IMNSHO, it's a no brainer if you already have a Pi... but even a NUC isn't a turnkey solution if you're set on Ubuntu. Still need to install that as well.

I did not realize the Argon came with an SSD adapter. That is pretty compelling and affordable.

Use the NanoPi family for this. Specifically the M4V2 with heat sink case: https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/09/09/nanopi-m4-sbc-nvme-s...

I bought an enclosure and related cards from Geekworm [1] some time ago, it's not using a NVMe, instead a 1TB SSD HD. Works like a charm.

[1] https://geekworm.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/raspb...

Perhaps an Odroid, eg: https://www.odroid.co.uk/ODROID-HC4

Considering how oversized the M1 Mac Mini is, I wonder whether Apple could release a M1 based Mac Nano once they moved to the M2 for all their more expensive devices. Considering the low TDP of the M1, it could be considerably shrunken vs. the Mini and quit a bit less expensive. That would make an excellent server for many tasks.

I would buy at least one such nano and stash it as a Mac build and media server. I wish apple stuck a 2.5 Gbps port on it though.

Aren’t most NASes ARM-based? While they don’t usually support NVMe, they do support SATA SSDs (which would max out at the same speed the Pi’s single-PCIe-lane NVMe gets you.)

Usually NASes are thought of as not too power efficient; but that’s because of the HDDs in them. Remove the spinning rust, remove the problem.

Agree. Lots of Synology/QNAP devices out there that are designed to be a NAS in form factor but also support things like VMs, containers, and the like. Some of them even do support NVM.

Depends, most I've seen are low power Intel but the power consumption should be roughly the same.

I've been testing an Asustor (latest gen) vs Pi NAS and all-in they use almost identical power at idle and at full tilt (drives included).

Surprised me since the NAS is running an Intel processor.

The RPi 400 only has 4GB but the board is integrated into a keyboard with a power button and a big heatsink, if you go for a (m)SATA SSD + USB3 adapter you still have a second USB3 port, those things can easily push 300MB/s with UASP, the official power supply should be enough in this case.

Those are pretty nice: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-4000-powered-asu...

We're building https://pibox.io/ - currently in testing!

Just need a case for the Tofu:

https://youtu.be/m-QSQ24_8LY

Idk about Ubuntu though. Raspberry Pi OS is based off of Debian and optimized for the pi.

Edit: Ah I was unfamiliar but of course there is an Ubuntu release for the pi. https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

Edit2: Ah I jumped straight to the Tofu board but I didn’t see that TFA features another nice board for this purpose.

In my experience Rasbian packages are very old, makes certain dev tasks harder.

Yep that’s fair. I had that trouble with Debian on my own systems and I tend to use Ubuntu on them now.

You also want a RTC so it keeps the time. I guess intel nuc owns this market at the moment.

Why doesn't an Argon ONE M.2 Case not fit your requirements? https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...

Or is it about having it all pre-built and pre-installed?

This case looks awesome! But yeah ideally it would be pre-built and pre-installed, with NVMe installed internally.

Did you seriously just state that you'd pay $200 for $250 worth of parts? And you want someone to design and integrate them for you on top of that?

edit: Ok sorry, apparently I miscalculated and it's actually possible to build this for less than $200.

How did you get to $250 worth of parts?

8GB Pi4 is $75

256GB NVMe M.2 SSD is ~$40

cases with a fan are ~$25

power supply is like $10 but let's say $20

That brings us to $160 give or take. Where is the extra $90 going?

I think $200 is doable with a healthy profit margin.

Woops, for some reason my first google result for the SSD was wildly overpriced.

How do you get to $250? 256GB NVMe runs for about $50 and a PI 8GB + peripherals for ~$100.

ask friends/coworkers about laptops with cracked screens

> low-power

> NVMe

pick one

But iPhone uses NVMe so theoretically both.