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. :)
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.