1y ago

So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it's all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I've got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

135 comments

So SBCs are shit now?
Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.
Use whatever you like, no need to race after others' subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.
- Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.
  Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.
  Don't get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.
  Actually I can't think of anything that raspberry pi does that can't be done better by a less expensive alternative.
  Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.
  
  Yeah, make a Pi with 1GB RAM, video & ethernet for like 20-30€ and you'd ruin me.
  I know about the banana, orange, whetever-pis but in my experience they always needed lots of extra stuff to work (like fucing and recompiling libraries). The Pi "just worked" IMO.
  
  Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.
  That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.
  I'd nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they're smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.
  
  price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor
  What's the model number for that?

People are shitting on them because the price point for arm sbcs has risen, while the price point for small x86 computers has come down. Also, x86 availability is high and arm sbc availability has become unreliable. They also aren't generally supported nearly as well. If you don't need more power and you already have them on hand there's no reason not to use them.
- I'm curious, what's an example of a mini x86 machine comparable to a raspberry pi? I just did research and ended up buying a RPI 5. I may have not known what to look for, but what I found in the x86 space was $200+ and seemed pretty underwhelming compared to a $80 SBC on arm.
  
  In 2022, when Pi4s were going for $150-200, I managed to get a 7th gen NUC for about $150. I was looking to start Home Assistant, so both were viable options, but even the Pi5’s coming close to $100 retail, spending 50% more gets you a lot more performance for a 7th gen intel i5/i7 mobile chip, 16gb of RAM and a 256GB NVME.
  
  https://www.acepcs.com/products/mini-pc-intel-n100-ultra is only $140, and it looks to me like Pi5+ is $160 with PS/case/microSD.
  
  You'd be looking at used mini PCs. I've heard really good things about lenovo. It's not necessarily exactly comparable in price, but the reason people are souring on arm SBCs, and especially PiS, is that it's only a little more for a more powerful lenovo, and there are never any supply issues.

The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.
- This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it's really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.
  If you're just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.
  
  less so with TCO considering the power budget...laptops however..
  
  And then there's still all the crap it needs to work, if you don't already have it. Power supply, adapters, storage, case, hats, etc.

The only reason SBCs were ever relevant is because of the excellent pricing, which has now been matched by used x86 computers. That and if the SBC had an open-source design/implementation (open schematics on RISC-V)
- Not just the pricing, but also the low footprint, tiny size and fanlessness.
  
  Low power too. I replaced a x86 server with 3 PIs in a k8s setup for about half the wattage.

I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there's someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.
- How bad is it?
  My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.
  I'm considering a TrueNAS box running either 2.5" ssd's or NVME sticks (My storage target is under 8TB, and that's including 3 years projected growth).
  
  Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.
  Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.
  
  Holy crap! I have a n100 SFF that consumes 5-6 w idle (with WiFi on) and I have an old i5 (gen 6 I think) that consumes 30 at idle. Your rig is defiantly not meant to act as a server (unless you want to mine bitcoons or run boinc...)
- My x86 Proxmox consumes about 0.3 kwh a day at around 15% average load. I've only had the Kill A Watt on it for a day, so I don't know how accurate that is, but it shouldn't be too far off.

What happened is that people realized what I've been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , https://lemmy.world/comment/4696545
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:
They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a "computer"? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we're seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi's market.
Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn't ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires... more adapters;
Price-wise it doesn't make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point... and way more stable with more expansion.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox
Proxmox isn't a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven't discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.
The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.
- Quite the teardown fair play
- The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It's just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.
  
  I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile "T" CPU that are very decent at idle.
- Do you think the used server market is worth the cost? It looks like I could have a giant chunk of DDR3 for not so much.
  
  I don't (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.
  Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.
  If you go really low end, let's say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you're interested.
  Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.
  Another thing to consider: you're trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.
- people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD
  From reading your comments I understand why. It's in your delivery. You're abrasive and you don't explain why. You're also telling people not to use something they know, to use something they don't know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial. As far as I can see, you've only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.
  You're essentially telling people to use something that is at best a side grade for reasons, and being salty about it.
  
  Ahaha I don’t explain why 😂😂
  I wrote dozens of posts replying to every single question people had about LXD/Incus. Gave out printscreens, explained how it works, what it does, described useful features and pointed out multiple issues of Proxmox. I can show you what roads you can take and why but you must do the work yourself.
  The same applies to the MiniPC vs Raspberry discussion as my price, performance and feature breakdowns and proved countless times that for a large number of use cases a MiniPC is better. Unsurprisingly this is the first of such breakdowns that got upvotes, and do you know why? Because a known youtuber in this space recently came out with a video saying the exact same things I've been saying and now it became "acceptable" to criticize the Raspberry Pi money grab.
  to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.
  Even if that were true, what’s was the issue then? Isn’t it obvious that a true open-source solution that is available on Debian’s repos from a fresh install is better than a half proprietary solution that asks you to buy a license at any turn? Use your common sense.
  Besides my comments aren't a marketing campaign there's no "LXD will make you rich today and solve all your family drama" as soon as you complete our three step formula:
  apt install lxd
  lxd init
  lxc launch debian debian-container
  The advantage of using LXD/Incus are on the details, not on a flashy and shinny feature. It's about running a clean Debian system, a non twisted and mangled kernel that will conflict with everything and not run stuff like OVPN properly, it's about the license, the tools, not depending on a company, not having to wait 3x the time before your cluster is online. It's about having a decent API for once and so many others.
  Most people say they don't want to be put in the same situation they were put about the the CentOS/RedHat licensing change, but then they proceeded to replace CentOS with Ubuntu and still use Proxmox. All questionable open-source that is as likely to fuck you over as RedHat did.
  So eventually there will be a video from some youtuber stating that LXD/Incus is much better than Proxmox and people will flock to it without questioning anything. :)

I don't understand this post. Whatever you bought then for they're still good for. People's opinions don't make them less useful.
- Sir, this is Lemmy. People treat the applications and hardware you use with ethical alignment and switching to FOSS literally has approval on the level of religious conversion.
  It's no wonder people around here care so much about random people's opinions, the place practically filters for it.

Pi 4's were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5's are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.
Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it's easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a 'real' computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn't even increase the electric bill.
For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, 'smart home' technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don't need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi's make sense, but I'm more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.
SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I'm still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.
- This is how I feel.
  I would much rather have a single machine running vms which I can easily snapshot and back up rather than a dozen small machines I have to deal with power supplies and networking.
  SBCs have specific use cases, usually where they need to interact with hardware. That's what made the rpi so great with it's GPIO and hats. But that's a rather small use case.
  
  I have pi4 with OpenMediaServer for SMB shares and videos to TV, it has docker and portainer add ins; so that single Pi has CUPS, Trillium Notes, PaperlessNG, homeassistant, kanboard, pdftk converter, syncthing. It could have more, I just ran out of applications I might need. no issues with performance.
- My pi4 8gb is awful as a jellyfin client am I doing something wrong? Pi OS, and just using Firefox to watch. CPU/GPU were maxed out, ram usage like 1gb
  
  Which codecs do you have in your library? Also which resolution/bitrate?
  Also, have a look at Kodi as a client.
  
  My guess is Firefox. I'm using Kodi - OSMC/libreelec - and it coasts along at 1080p, with plenty of spare CPU to run pihole and some environmental monitors. Haven't tried anything 4k, but supposedly Pi4 offloads that to hardware decoding and handles it just fine. (as long as the codec is supported).

huh? What happened? Who's shitting on ARM?
- Man who sits upside on toilet.
- man reads few comments on the internet.
  man takes it literally.
  Anxiety sets in
  ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

I'm just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.
Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.

2 - 8 watts of power for a Pi vs 9-150watts for an x86 system. There are definitely use-cases.
I use a Pi for DHCP, DNS with PiHole, Tailscale Subnet Router, Rustdesk server, Vaultwarden, Syncthing (connects to local device shares, rather than run ST on each device), ArchiveBox, and working on instant messaging (maybe SimpleX, not sure yet). It's kind of maxed out.
But all this runs under 8watts (actually it's so low my smart switch doesn't even register the consumption).
- Uh, my server is an x86, is fanless and the cpu idles at 9 and maxes at 12. Is much faster then my pi and has quicksync.
  I run plex, jellyfin, smb shares, mealie, tailscale and rerouting, notes, and books.
  I like my pi but performance per watt isn't as drastic with x86 if you build for it. Did I mention it's also fanless? Passive heating that just works on the cpu.
  
  Nice!
  Yea, I've been eyeing a box like that, looks like it could be useful.
- New X86 processors are as efficient as the Apple M series. They are far more power efficient than a Pi under load, though they will consume slightly more at idle. But not nearly as much as you're suggesting.

A lot of stuff runs great on SBCs, it's just that they're not as smooth to manage as a Proxmox server running containers or VMs. You also need several SBCs to reach the scale of what many do here on selfhosted and once you reach 4+ SBCs the old x86 server starts looking cost effective all of a sudden. The biggest benefit though is the no noise and very low power consumption, which is great for stuff that will be powered on 24/7/365.
Really a mix is ideal, so you can get the benefits of cheap running costs of SBCs and the power and versatility of x86 for the tasks that require it.

It's about fitness for purpose, IMO.
I recently migrated most of my homelab to Proxmox running on a pair of x86 boxes. I did it because I was cutting the streaming cord, and wanted to build a beefy Plex capability for myself. I also wanted to virtualise my router/firewall with OPNsense.
Once I mastered Proxmox, and truly came to appreciate both the clean separation of services and the rapid prototyping capability it gave me, I migrated a lot of my homelab over.
But, I still use RasPis for a few purposes: Frigate server, second Pi-hole instance, backup Wireguard server. I even have one dedicated to hosting temperature sensors, reed switches, and webcams for our pet lizard's enclosure.
Each has their place for me.
- Same feeling, except that rather than lizard enclosure, I am waiting to see how long that Pi will last in the heat and dust of a chicken coop while serving the sole purpose of a "do we have eggs?" And/or "WTF happened/WTF did the chickens do?" Web stream

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
Fuck, if you can't figure out what to do with them, give them to me and I will! There's so many fun art projects you can get up to with Pis.
- I say bin them. Throw them into the ocean
  
  Username checks out

If you're not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.
I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.

I have a microserver and various pis ( zero w, 2x 3b+ and a pi b)
With the exception of the zero w they are all still in action.
The pi b connects to the pi touchscreen and displays photos from a directory every 5 minutes.
The 2x3bs are running kodi to stream from my server.
The zero w was a camera recording and streaming 24/7 but I stopped it as I wanted to do other stuff with it.
- I kept buying Pi Zero Ws, hats and phats then put them all in a drawer cos I couldn't decide what to do with them. I think I've got about 7 or 8. I really should do something with them.
  
  pwnagotchi family

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?
It's because the price point is really high now. There's nothing wrong with the hardware you have.

Don't bin them, sell them

A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn't shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you're literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.
Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC's from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.

Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.
If I could do that with raspberry pi's I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it's doing what you want then don't worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.
- What is that virtual pipe organ and why is it using 69 GB RAM when running?
  
  It is software (grandorgue) that pretends to be a pipe organ (the instrument). In order to run fast enough it needs to load every sound sample into memory to play, as well as usually multiple kinds of sound endings. I play professionally on a "small to mid sized" pipe organ with 1,438 pipes. The one I load for use at home has more than that!
  The instrument was from the 1960s and I rebuilt it with a pi pico that you can see here, and you can hear the before (analog sound cards) versus one of the organs I've loaded into it here.

The problems I've had with my RPis have all revolved around the fragility of their SD storage. I got burned one too many times trying to host something important in my house with these things, just for them to get corrupted and lose everything. Backing up these systems was its own nightmare, which failed as much as it succeeded.
- It didn't help that when they enabled USB boot for RPis, the first thing everybody did was connect cheap USB flash drives that corrupted even faster.

Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.

They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.

Still got'em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I've really only done some hardware dev on. I'll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn't seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it. But yeah, five liters of fun...

I missed this sentiment. Just bought my first RPI (5) and it's a neat little toy. I have some pretty specific requirements I'll have to work toward but I like tinkering with it. The size, price and low power consumption beat any of the mini PCs I found. Then again I'm probably out of the loop
- I'm the same. Took my sweet time getting my Pi5 and now I'm a zealot!

Attach a small camera to one of them and attach it to a bird feeder. Set another one up with frigate.
It's a fun use and actually good for the environment.

I have a pi which I use as an apple tv/firestick alternative which works very well and would be pretty pointless with a larger pc imo. Servers I dont do with small PIs but indeed old computers. I think all kinds of ultra movable devices will be good with PI and derivatives.
For folks that want to get into it: pine64 is open source but I havent tried it yet. Thinking of it though. They even have a watch.
- The two things to keep in mind with pine64 is that they ship hardware before the software is ready and because they are less popular there is less support.
  I like there hardware but its just something to keep in mind. The good news is that to my knowledge all of their single board computers can run regular linux.
  
  Thanks for mentioning that. Iirc they use risc-v chips and linux supports it so it should work I guess. Will check it out.

Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Jeff Geerling
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

If I had all the time I wanted to homelab, I would get me a Nas box and run like 10 pis of different vintages as purpose built servers.
A pi to run PHP, a pi to run mysql, a fleet of pis as docker nodes.

Sbcs are neat and raspi is still cool imo, i guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too and the recent releases with 6, 8, 12, cores are enticing to a group of people. Really depends on what you want to do, right tool for the right job etc
- I guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too
  People always knew x86s existed. I think the main culprit is the price gap between them and Pis is decreasing. Pis used to be around $35, which has skyrocketed to 3-5x MSRP, plus they were unavailable for a long time. Now the Pi's performance to price ratio isn't justifiable to most, so people pay a little more for the x86 but get so much more capability.
  
  This is the answer I've found as well, bang on

I thought this was about FIFA

If you're not doing stuff with them; not much point.
Since these devices have ARM processors, they can be embedded to places that doesn't need high power and contain smaller volume; unlike PCs. You can host your a Jellyfin server on one, host a pi-hole so that you filter out every internet traffic from ads on another. Maybe a small FTP server that you can use as cloud storage?

I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe	Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
k8s	Kubernetes container management package

16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

[Thread #449 for this sub, first seen 24th Jan 2024, 01:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I got lost with setting up a nice inbox downloader to store all my emails on a HDD attached to my RPI4, but haven't quite mastered the SMTP server part or found the right software to run on it. It's currently powered off waiting for a reflash of the SD Card so I can try again. The end goal for mine is to set up fetchmail and have it grab from my inboxes then imap capabilities so I can read it in Thunderbird. (Don't talk to me about webmail, I know it's the way but I'm older than Star Wars (Original one) and am stuck in my ways. Now get off of my lawn!
Seriously though, I have tinkered with it before as an AdguardHome Server, but somehow, my latency increased so I dropped that. Most of it's life was spent hosting Home Assistant on it until I moved that to the umm...more controversial Proxmox VM method. I'm also on the fence about setting up the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud on it. (Maybe).
Here is a good resource for 36 different things you could possibly do with yours.

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.
Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding --- so it presumably won't draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I'm guessing it's ballpark accurate.
Works flawlessly for Immich of course.
The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.
For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

I am nearly complete migrating my ceph cluster and nomad compute cluster to arm :shrug:

I bought a dozen of pi4 when they were so cheap but i actually dont know what exactly to do with them. I actually would love some ideas
- I had the same question few days back here
  https://biglemmowski.win/post/546746
  
  I’m more lost reading this hahaha
- The next pi I get will be turned into an MT32-Pi for use with my Mister retro setup and classic PC games.
  https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi
  It can also be used as a midi synth if you're into that
  
  Hell yeah! I had bought a front end called lunchbox a long time ago but i havent got to install moonlight streaming either :) for midis that’s an awesome idea too. Maybe one raspberry PI for all music stuff… thats one way to organise things too

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