1d ago

Can I pick something better than a Raspberry Pi 4B/5 for a low-power home server?

I'm going to run generic server tasks (webhosting, Nextcloud, Home Assistant) but also use it as a torrent client, NAS and media center. It will sit close to the dumb TV and give it IPTV and file playback capabilities. I haven't decided between a SBC or mini PC yet.

My requirements are:

low idle power consumption (electricity is expensive here, I'm aiming for 5 W with the HDD spun down, able to idle without spinning the fan) so preferrably ARM
reliability (I'm worried about SD cards in particular, maybe booting from NVMe/mSATA is better)
connecting my 8TB SATA HDD
Bluetooth+WiFi+100Mb/s Ethernet
no dedicated GPU or NPU needed
1x FullHD video output (HDMI or even VGA, the TV is ancient)
GPIO for IR receiver (IPTV should be accessible to tech-illiterate parents)
budget of 100 € for the whole setup
available in the Czech Republic (preferring local retailers or used market to Amazon or Aliexpress)

Raspberry Pi 4/5 seems compelling but the HDD needs a separate 12V source and USB adapter, making the setup a little unwieldy, plus people say RPi is overpriced. Mini PCs boot from reliable storage but lack GPIO so they need a USB infraport, and many don't have SATA or wireless either so that adds more adapters. Or should I repurpose my old laptop, which would run at 10 W and need an adapter for IR but have wireless (and kind of a UPS) built in?

I think that there might be other SBCs (RPi competitors) suited for my use case but I haven't been able to find a better deal than a used 60 € Raspberry Pi 4B/5 (+10 € fan box + 20 € high-endurance SD card + 2 € microHDMI adapter + I already have the power adapter) from the official site. Given that the 4B and 5 with 4GB RAM cost almost the same, I wonder if the power upgrade is worth it given that the 5's idle power draw is higher, there is no A/V jack (I can solder though) and I only have the 3A power supply, requiring an extra 20 € to use its full CPU power.

38 comments

I second the miniPC suggestions, I have a Dell Optiplex 9020M (bought used for about €70 some two years ago), put an SSD in it plus 8 GB RAM, and it handles anything I throw at it (minus real-time video transcoding).
I use it in a headless way, so YMMV with the video displaying part, but I doubt a Pi would be stronger in this regard.
In any case, I think it's worth looking around before committing to a Pi, these micro pcs are quite convenient to carry/store/service, and they are self-contained unlike a Pi.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Here's the article that started me down this path ^
Edit: I see you're more into electronics, and I don't know much about GPIO on these machines, so the laptop may be the simplest solution then - in any case, it's nice to have options
Yes, you're allowed
You want a multi-function server with some rather bloaty software, so an rpi is probably the simplest approach even if you can save a small fraction of the idle power with another board. If your SATA drive needs 12V then it needs 12V and the cpu won't matter. Maybe you can use a 2.5" SATA drive that runs on just 5V.
Why is the idle power so important for a home setup? Can you deploy a solar panel? They are stupidly cheap now.
Too bad so few PC GPUs support HDMI CEC: you wouldn't need a dedicated IR port on the machine, and your parents wouldn't have to figure out a new remote.
- I don't think the TV does either
I used to run my nas from a raspberry pi with an USB to Sata bridge, but I found that USB cables are as always super unreliable and keep disconnecting and eventually I get filesystem errors, had to format and restore from backup.
I ended up repurposing an old i3 computer as nas. Which worked well for few years until I was scrubbing the harddrives this summer and one of the harddrives died, when I took it off it was super hot. So I learned that having front fans blowing air directly to the hardrives is important so they don't overheat. I'm not sure if external cases have enough air circulation.
So maybe you could consider the overall reliability of the system and temperature of the harddrive, electricity can be expensive but an 8TB harddrive surely is more. Also you say you want no fan, so that makes things harder, maybe you can use the raspberry pi just as a client and have a big noisy NAS made from some old computer somewhere else in the house? And maybe have it so it wakes up on LAN when it's being used and powered down when it's not to safe power?
- I'm OK with a fan running when the HDD is spinning. To save power, a SSD can perhaps be used as a cache to minimize HDD usage time during file transfers over LAN or torrent.
  
  Maybe you can use the raspberry pi gpio to control the fan and get drive temperature via smart to control the fan speed.
The Fujitsu Futro S740 are quite nifty little devices which can be found for around 50-60€ on the used market. They use <5W at idle and have more compute power than a raspberry pi 5.
A nice writeup about these can be found here
- Fujitsu Futro S740
  Now that's a good recommendation. I didn't find any for sale around here but I can get an HP T530 that also idles below 10 W for 35 €. I'd need to buy an HDMI-DP adapter, plus an M.2 SSD or a wireless module (they use the same slot and there's just one), the other would need to be a USB peripheral.
There are small miniPCs that are designed to sip power. You may want to take a look.
Im not sure you will get 5 W for anything other than a pi but you can try!
- Yeah but at that point I can just use the 10 year old laptop I have lying around, since size is not really a priority. I have installed Lubuntu on its HDD and it's been so-so as an HTPC but I think it will be alright with a new small SATA SSD. It might need a lid + power button hack (using simple electronics wired to the corresponding connectors?) though because the BIOS has no "power on AC" option to get it back up after an outage.
  
  Upgrading that laptop to an SSD is essential and will make it seem like a much newer machine. If space isnt a priority, just use the laptop with an SSD. It's essentially the same as a mini-PC with a built-in monitor. You won't have GPIO, but there has to be some sort of USB IR adapter out there.
  The Pi5 is overpriced and requires what might as well be a proprietary power connector (5V5A USB is absurd) costing you even more. You'll have less computing power at a higher cost with this option.
don't need GPIO or IR; there's a buncha android bluetooth remotes around that you can repurpose via input-remapper
don't need SATA for 3.5 drives, there are USB-to-SATA adapters in the sub$20 range
so that allows you to go for a board from a discarded laptop. you need skylake or newer for purposes of video decoding and power efficiency and a board that can run without battery and display (e.g., most thinkpads can, some consumer models can't).
a search in my local marketplace nets 20+ of those in the sub$40 range (busted screens, keyboards, etc.), you get all the connectivity, way more storage options than rpi, included power brick, and you don't hafta dick around with arm packages.
- I already have two USB adapters for SATA, they just require Molex connectors so I need an entire ATX PSU right now to power the drive. They will be enough to get the setup going before I measure how much power I actually need and solder an appropriate 12V and 5V supply to the cable.
  I have an old laptop that is used as an HTPC but not much anymore. It runs Lubuntu alright but it needs an upgrade to an SSD. I think I'll shell out a little extra for 512 GB rather than some 64-128 GB the Linux+software install needs, so I can cache media there and reduce the HDD utilization. A hack will be required to bypass the lack of "power on AC" in the BIOS, probably removing the lid magnets and wiring the power switch to an Arduino or something to facilitate a restart after a power outage (long unplanned outages are rare though so I might get away without that right now). The idle power usage will be some 10 W but I can live with that.
  I wonder if there is an advanced BitTorrent client that can import my extensive qBittorrent library and respond to supply/demand while minimizing the HDD's duty cycle... for example refusing to spin it up just to seed public or overseeded torrents, and only spinning it up to copy the contents to SSD for files that are on demand, or write completed downloads from SSD to HDD.
I think the Aoostar R1 will be the simplest setup for you. The N100/N150 have pretty good idle power usage, and it supports 2 3.5HDDs and NVME.
- It's around 3x the budget, which is a greater dealbreaker than a USB3.0-SATA adapter plus 12V source, all of which I already own.
  Also, the R1 name sounds too AI-y to me (Rabbit, DeepSeek) but that's not really relevant.
  
  If your budget is that tight, I would just say just repurpose your laptop, just take the battery out if it's not already.
Might be worth looking into ODroid H4+ (or any other really) especially into non-arm architecture (personally had more issues than I would've wanted).
- All the use cases I need are well-documented on ARM by the RPi community. What issues do you think I'd encounter?
  
  Docker runs abbhorently, instability and having to restart every week or so (tried Raspbian, Arch, Alpine, and all went unstable in a couple of days, even tried changing the SD and power supply).
  Back on the day, sure, ARM was the thing you wanted if you went for maximum power saving, but I think there are comparable options that give more bank for your buck in the x86 space, especially if you want to repurpose it later.
  In the end, go for whatever you want, you can always sell it later if you don't like it. I'd just personally wouldn't go for ARM anymore.
  If I was buying a Pi, I'd go second hand.
I think some of the modern mini-PCs with Intel N95 or N100 cpus can do that level of power draw. Alternative, use a mobile phone compatibel with and installed with Ubuntu Touch or postmarketOS, so you can run a linux file server on the phone. USB might be a bit of a faff, but usb-C will prevail I think.
- USB-C definitely can handle a 768p monitor plus playing video from disk and 100Mbit Ethernet, it's just that most phones under my 100 € budget (cut short by the dongle) don't even have 2.0 OTG capabilities because they're basic ones for seniors. The only hope to get a discount on the good ones are those with a semi-busted screen but I'm not relying on that to install Linux.
- Yeah, as long as you get a phone that supports usb-c 3.0 or higher, you can get one of those powered hubs that charges your phone and has a gigabit Ethernet port.
  
  Not for the budget. I have some spare phones but no USB-C ones and there is no way this all works over microUSB, even with MHL.
I think its difficult to get away from an usb converter for you hdd and that seem to be the only reason for not choosing RP ? RP's are overpriced, but you can probably find a HAT for the sata connection in the rp ecosystem.
Alternatively, you could look for usb connectors for both hdd and gpio, an old usb-hub, and choose a small orangepi 2 ..ish usb-stick (with hdmi, i think) as a base. It shouldn't cost that much, and power usage is extremely low on the first clones while still having a little power for video etc. The stick should oc be able to power down the hdd via usb.
Alternatively *2, maybe you can repurpose your laptop, let it hibernate but enable power/wakeup on a usb port, plug in the cheapest gpio unit you can find, and when the tech-illerates try the remote, the stick wakes up the laptop via usb, and your laptop plays the video ? Not sure when to let the laptop power down, but that seems doable. RP2 had a ridiculously low power usage afair, so it can be on always. Not sure what a sleeping laptop draws beside the usb power draw. Oh, and an old laptop might not be able to keep your usb port on while sleeping.
Cheap, but definitely more clunky..
- The device will run 100% of the time as a torrent client and NAS so I don't really need to solve the power-on issue, long unplanned outages are rare and I can probably bridge the short ones by going low power and waking up every hour.

38 comments