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.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        10 months ago

        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 will use a LOT of power.

        Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can even get very good 9-10th gen Intel CPUs and motherboards that are perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. This hardware is also way more power efficient and sometimes even more powerful than any server hardware that you might get for the same price.

        Even if you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. Server hardware is overkill, wastes power and older CPUs aren’t that great. You can use https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs if you’re interested. Even if you trying to make a NAS and get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports then you ca add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper. Then use BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed.

        Most server hardware that is DDR3 comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, nowadays 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.

        You may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, don’t. Your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or mechanical drives and when this happen you’ll get something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Thank you, really appreciate your advice. I was just struggling to install Proxmox on a new machine, and you made me take a step back. The kernel is messed up, do I really want this? Why am I jumping through hoops for this when Debian has zero issues installing? I’ll be trying the container software you mentioned instead.

          • 1371113@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            I’ve done the same thing as the person you replied to is suggesting for around 10 years now. It works very well for a home user because parts etc are readily available. Most hypervisors will run on x86/amd64 hardware without issue. Check out something other than proxmox. LXC is one suggestion. If you’re going to stick with Debian look into SAMBA with BIND to ensure ease of sharing and cross platform integration.

            Another reason to not get an old server is power, noise and thermals. They’re designed to live in an air conditioned room. Anyone who works in server rooms for any length of time will tell you to wear ear protection.