Alternative Imgur version for the main image
Previously I was using Samsung N150P (netbook) as my home server and it served me around 6 years. >> https://programming.dev/post/708584
Though after upgrading to Debian 13, additional 90 packages were installed just with the upgrade. I also had a little adventure with it :) >> https://programming.dev/post/708488
Anyway, this new mini PC I got is from 2016 and surprisingly it has 8GB DDR3 RAM (I’m rich now). It’s generally in good condition. Even though it’s Celeron N3000, this one doesn’t have hyperthreading so only 2 cores. Still it’s a real upgrade over Atom N450 CPU.
Since last year, I was planning to get a Raspberry Pi and moving from there. However thanks to AI overlords it got so expensive I had to bail from that fantasy. I got this for 40$ and with 8GB RAM I think it was a good deal.
I was already planning to change my home server to Alpine for a while but I just couldn’t touch a perfectly fine system because lazy. So this time I went with Alpine and I already love how small it is. I just installed a couple monitoring tools and packages like sudo along with Pi-hole so currently it has quite few packages.
Don’t worry though, I’m planning to use that RAM, with time. :)
Honestly, AI pricing or not, raspi just isnt a good time for a home server. I used to churn through SD cards on mine, and the software compatibility was quite annoying, particularly with docker images.
Intelx86 minipcs have been far easier to deal with IMO. And $40 is a bargain.I’ve been using Rapsberry Pi’s for almost a decade now and I have yet to burn out a single SD card on them. But maybe I don’t really put them under the same strain others do.
It could be that I was using particularly shit SD cards, or putting too much continuous load on them, but I have killed a handful of them over the time I used them. I dunno, could be user error for sure.
I have never managed to kill an SSD though, so I trust them much more.
In my case, I had swap space on the SD card, and suspect that’s what killed it. After replacing the card and disabling swap, I haven’t had any problems for the last couple years
I’ve got a box I made with a air filter and 200mm fan on one end, then it blows through a “tunnel” that has a network switch and 4 Raspberry Pis inside, one runs Frigate with an AI hat, another runs home assistant, another is running my Pi Hole, another is basically a NAS with a 2TB external USB drive, and they do a whole bunch of other miscellaneous ad-hoc tasks. The clean airflow keeps them cool just sitting there with open PCBs and the normal little heat sinks, they’re all wired to the switch so only 1 ethernet cable comes out.
On the one hand, a single Core i3 PC could probably handle ALL the tasks easily enough, but… what about when Frigate goes weird? I don’t want my whole home DNS/DHCP and home automation to go with it. Same for everything else, and if one of the microSD cards goes bad (none have yet after over 1000 days of 24 hour continuous operation except during power outages) - that’s just one thing going bad, not EVERYTHING.
I must admit the 2TB external drive is cheap junk, and those things do “wear out” - even internal SSDs go bad over time, I’ve had it happen at work more than once within about 5 years of normal use. I try to get the better microSD cards for the Pis and so far they’re not having problems for me.
One thing you can look into if you like messing around with system configurations is partitioning your microSD with “immutable” partitions where any changes are written in RAM (yes, RAM heavy Pis are even more expensive than they used to be, but it all depends on your application…) I do this for my Pis that run around in the world and get their power cut off without warning - failures are so rare in the first place it’s hard to know if all the partition work is worth the effort, but so far I’ve never had a corrupt file system with the immutable partitions carefully configured, and I have had several before I started doing that - not failed SD cards, just corrupt filesystems that needed to be re-formatted.
Did you add the fs2ram stuff. Uses RAM for all the temp writes and stuff so SD card only deals with actual file storage access.
I tried some things like that, not sure which ones specifically. The ones I tried were very fiddly though.
They (fs2ram and similar) are annoyingly, frustratingly fiddly and not worth the effort IMO… until I got Claude to do the fiddly bits for me… It isn’t just the initial setup, it’s also the additional hoops you have to go through whenever you want to change something on the “protected” partition. Fiddly is the word for it, not hard, but time and brain-power consuming.
If you’re not doing a lot of writes, log2ram might be good enough and isn’t that hard to set up
I mean, I think you have reason to trust SSDs more anyway. They’re just physically designed for more wear and tear than SD cards are, even if I’ve never destroyed an SD card myself I’m aware of their lack of resilience compared to SSDs.
And yeah, I always dropped the extra money for Samsung Pro SD cards, maybe that’s part of it, too.
I agree with you about the sd cards. But pi 4 and higher can boot directly from SSD (in a usb enclosure, or for pi 5 via pci-e add on card). It takes a lot of the pain out of hosting on pi. I also still have an old pi 3b chugging along as a NUT server running off an sd-card with a read-only file system - another solution for the card rot problem.
And they are still lower power then anything x86. For me a mix of both pi and mini-pc work great.
I had a pi4 booting from a USB ssd, but it was very flakey. Just a slight bump on the SSD and it would disconnect and never remount, so I wasn’t super confident with it. Happened with a few different SSDs on different ports as well.
As for power, my pi4 + SSD was chugging down 15w, and the nuc that replaced it was also around 15w when limited properly, so it isnt as clear cut as it used to be. That was with identical services, homeassistant and a few local web services. I suspected the pi4 was never really able to idle.
My Pi 3b is configured to host PiHole, Unbound, and Kiwix (Wikipedia), yet it only writes to SD once a month for Kiwix, and once a week for PiHole. Unbound and all logs live in memory.
I tried to get logs into memory, but found that it was a bit tedious chasing down a dozen or so services that logged to different places. And when my pi developed a spontaneous reset issue, not having logs was a bit of a problem.
raspi was an option back then, but now it’s inflated and almost any MiniPC is a better choice
Yeah I agree, I can do many more things with this comparing to RPi. Interestingly this one also has a microSD slot, though I went with regular SATA SSD and obviously it’s quite faster than a system running on a microSD card. I just can’t believe the pricing on RPi devices. It’s almost three times the price here comparing to what I got.
The pricing is just insane. Its $450-500AUD for a 16GB pi5 (without storage), and I recently got a secondhand nuc with 16GB and storage for $200AUD.
Pis also don’t seem to have a second hand market (which as a hoarder of pi3’s I am part of the problem).
That’s just a lot!
Yeah, I checked second hand market and Pi’s are almost none-existant here and the ones I found weren’t cheap either. I also noticed that there were a lot of 32-bit Atom CPU mini PCs for 25$, but they were a downgrade from my netbook. Comparing to them 40$ is great I guess.
Why Intel mini PCs? I run an AMD mini PC that seems to work great but I don’t ask much of it yet.
Not really Intel specific, just intel seems to be the most commonly available.
I just lazily used “Intel” to mean x86.
Isn’t Intel Quicksync needed for Jellyfin transcoding? I got a mini PC for my server and specifically looked only for Intel. Got another mini PC for my desktop workstation and specifically looked for a Ryzen, that iGPU is doing a great job of running all the games I’m interested in.
I have a full size PC with a nvidia gt1030 for Jellyfin, I think it uses nvidias transcoding api when that is available.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/hardware-acceleration/
Looks like there are lots of options for hardware accel, so as long as you have one of them it should be fine?
Ah, gotcha! I was worried for a second that I made a poor choice.
have an ASUS PN51 with the Ryzen 5 in it running Ubuntuwith docker containers for each appliance.