A somewhat controversial claim, but only until you discover that it's the low-profile home server use case under discussion here.
I'd go with a Qotom box for that, but something like this would be about as good and, at the cited prices, a fair bit cheaper - and wouldn't involve the same US Customs import encumbrance that I've found Qotom hardware to entail, besides. But I think it would depend on being able to find used FX160s cheaply, as the article describes, and since its description of a sudden glut in the used market seems written from an Australian perspective, I imagine that might be an issue elsewhere.
I have a similar one, but it gives up two NICs for an HDMI port - not ideal, but it was much cheaper at the time, and I have no need for a DMZ and no shortage of switches. It makes an excellent pfSense box!
They make fanless metal body mini computers and come in many variations on aliexpress. I purchased a unit a few months back to run pfsense (free routing software based on freebsd). They normally use intel based motherboard/ethernet ports in 2-4 port configurations, making them good stable platforms. They usually take a few weeks to arrive because they ship from China. They don't have the polish of an apple product or sell under a popular brand name, so they are not well known.
Another option for industrial and fanless in europe is Logic Supply. I bought my "home server" from them. A very simple Xeon box with internal SSD that I use as hypervisor with a homemade iSCSI NAS for storage.
Depends on what it's for, I suppose. These have no ram or hdd. I'd spend $75 on a used Asus Chromebox instead. Then you get 2gb ram + 16gb ssd. And you can reflash it to run regular Linux. Has an open ram slot too.
Or, if you want a fast dev board, the Odroids are $35 to $60.
> Or, if you want a fast dev board, the Odroids are $35 to $60.
The Odroids are fast, yes, but they are stuck with old kernels in Linux, buggy drivers (especially video), and a very limited OS compatibility list overall. If you're developing with the Odroid as your target, fine, but for general purpose computing you're better off with the Pi if you want ARM, or else a cheap x86 box like the article mentions.
The Asus Chromebox is a cheap x86 box. It is basically a cheap NUC.
As for odroid, I mentioned it because one of the points in referenced article was lackluster speed on the Rpi. If the Rpi is fast enough for what you're doing, none of this is needed.
Yep, speed is the biggest issue on the RPi, both the CPU itself (even the Pi 3) and the network/USB bandwidth. The Odroid is faster, but what's the point of having the fastest board in town if you can only run one or two broken distros on it?
Depends on what you're doing with it I suppose. Everything I've needed dev boards for has been headless, so I never had to deal with GPU driver issues. I recall rpi having issues in that area before as well though.
Odroid says it works with Ubuntu 16.04. that's the current LTS, isn't it?
Used laptops are a great option for a home server. I think people tend to overlook them because it seems counter intuitive to use a laptop as a server. It's actually super practical though. Nice to have things like a built-in display, keyboard, wifi, battery, etc when you need them.
It depends on what you want to do with a home server. Is it a home entertainment system with ready-to-use entertainment UI? A computer in a compact case no larger than the size of a modem/router with just an OS installed (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX)?
The former is popularly taken over by the integrated system within TV / media player (yes, many of the newest DVD & BlueRay media players do come with a better, surprisingly [1], integrated system), and you can play media like Netflix / YouTube from your mobile phone.
The latter is somewhat a customized solution, depending on what you do. I would run on my old laptop, or I can run on a raspberry Pi (which is capable of running HD video at 1080p), plus a large SSD network storage device (or use "cloud" if you have a good Internet connectivity).
There are plenty options out there, but for a $60 deal (USD) is pretty good. Most big brands can easily cost you $100+ with just Atom CPU in it. I wouldn't mind getting one though, if it becomes available again.
[1]: Samsung BD-JM57C Streaming Blu-ray Player (love it)
Indeed, while I would like to see them post some cons to go along with the pros, it definitely felt more like sharing a neat find rather than an advertisement. Dell certainly isn't profiting from the sale of 2008 era thin clients on the used market.
I'm definitely not selling them! I just think they're cool. I picked one up out of curiosity and thought I'd let people know. I did chuck my affiliate code on the eBay link though.
I'll back you up on that one, even though a few of my posts pointed out some things that I think you should have also considered in your analysis.
The reality is that this little PC is a solid choice to consider for a low-end home server -- especially if you have a particular need/desire for x86[0]. They're different platforms that serve different purposes and a micro-desktop like this has a lot of good uses. I used to use a similar device as my playback PC and loved that I could play back every format without having something have to transcode it for me[1].
It didn't even cross my mind to think of that post as 'advertising' or that you might be the actual seller, and I use affiliate links any time I link to a product where I have an affiliate account. I think I've made $5 over a few years, so I wouldn't be inclined to think the inclusion of an affiliate link causes a post to be considered spammy or a motivation to spam. For me, it's just easier to click the associates banner at the top and get a short-link that way.
Personally speaking, I enjoyed the post and think it had plenty of value even though I didn't agree completely with the conclusion and decided to pull a 'Someone is Wrong on the Internet!'[2]. So to offset this small amount of grief you have received, consider this my 'Many Thanks for Sharing' and encouragement to continue to do so.
[0] Personally, I reload my computer enough and it's always painful for me to go through the steps of setting up my environment for cross-compiling to ARM. I never quite get it right on the first try and often give up half-way through, delaying getting things done that I want to do. If it's x86, I can compile locally and cp away.
[1] I'm not sure if that processor could handle H.265, but at the time I was running this device -- which later became my Plex server -- H.265 didn't exist. If it can play back h.265, that would make this quite a solid product for that purpose.
Nothing with an Atom CPU will do H265 playback. It'll stream fine with Plex to a playback device that supports it, but I'm not sure what's out there that supports H265. Maybe some sort of Chinese Android TV box?
Hey thanks for the tip.
I've been thinking of setting up little media station thing...getting tired of using my mac keyboard as a remote..
I have a question.. for anybody, what is the difference between using a PC as media server as OP describes, or using a little Android box thing like the Mi, or something like Apple TV?
Basically I have a MBP, and I'll be getting a TV soon, and I want to be able to easily watch dls on the TV, using a remote. And I'd prefer not to have my laptop doing the grunt work.
Please don't insinuate this kind of thing on HN unless you have evidence. It degrades the spirit of the community and most of the time is quite inaccurate.
There's a cognitive bias whereby we assume that if something seems wrong to us, nobody else could possibly hold that view in good faith (i.e. they must be astroturfing or shilling). But people hold opposing views in good faith all the time.
If you're in a bigger company, the IT department may have some smaller PCs like this to get rid of. Mine gave a bunch out, I have a Dell optiplex - but instead of the thin client it's a small i3, with a 320gb hdd and 6gb ram. It's dead silent and runs all the home server things like a champ, oh - and it was free.
But I'd still own a number of raspberry pis since they're great for hacking or just to support a cool mission (in my opinion).
Worth noting here I feel, as a general point, that profits can't be distributed but the same monies can be paid out as wages. You can - or could last I heard - pay people million dollar wages as a UK "Charity"; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11435754/32-charity... quotes some £750k+ wages.
Charities can make "investments" too.
AFAIK the RPi foundation is completely straight in this respect, just worth mentioning the general position for UK Charities IMO.
> we provide outreach and education to help more people access computing and digital making. We develop free resources to help people learn about computing and how to make things with computers, and train educators who can guide other people to learn
Gah - thanks for pointing this out! I made an error that I'm guessing a few others' did -- I compared the $35USD against the $59AUD price. This makes a little more sense.
There are a few things that offset this, though. The eBay OptiPlex ships without RAM. The author points out that this adds a minimal $20AUD, but that offsets the sticker price difference. In addition, if Hacker News is the target audience and you folks are anything like me, I have a medium sized box filled with USB cables and power adapters -- more than half of which meet the specs to power a Pi, not to mention about 4 high-end multi-port units, one of which sits where my servers are and has available ports. Plus, on my nightstand next to me are three 16GB MicroSD cards that I could re-purpose for a Pi, so those costs are very efficient for me -- I'd just end up actually using something that's laying around.
Neither come with substantial storage, though. So you're going to be buying a drive to attach to either if you want to serve up video files or the likes.
This puts them about even at sticker price, but you're not leaving them in the box. You have to consider total cost of ownership with a PC just like with a car. The author states that these are silent but it has an HDD fan and it's unclear if there are other fans in the device -- these will wear. And then there's the cost of electricity. I couldn't find any data on power consumption at load/idle but a look at the specs indicates that this ships with a (rather economical/small) 50W power supply (it's 87% efficient). 50W for a PC is quite good, but it's awful compared against a Pi. The Pi is 1.4W idle and 3.7W at load[0]. Granted, more would be required for any external disks being added, but going SSD would be low power as well. Assuming the device will be 'always on', the Dell PC will cost substantially more.
50W would appear to be a maximum, the article shows a meter at 20W which is presumably total power from the wall socket. Once power consumption gets low enough it should cease to be a consideration. Everybody will have their own threshold for "low enough", but I personally wouldn't stay awake at night over 20W.
It can be a little tricky, but if you know what the adapter is rated to handle it usually isn't too tough to find one that works. About 5 years ago I ordered some 4-port 2.1A Monoprice PoS adapters for a few bucks a piece. I routinely use these for my RPis, but with only one RPi plugged in (add any second device and the thing will start flaking).
Off-lease Dell PCs are great for this sort of thing. My AirPort Extreme isn't quite up to the task of routing a gigabit fiber connection with all the bells and whistles, so I got a Dell Precison T1700 off EBay. Quad core 3.2 Ghz Xeon e3 for $150!
That is a great call, an atom would struggle big time running plex, I have a Thinkcentre M92p which is tiny and silent, do wish it had a tiny bit more grunt but was pretty good value for $200.
Have you ever tried an Atom processor for running Plex? I've always been curious how it would perform.
I had an older Atom device running Plex server for quite a while, but back then I almost never needed full transcoding for playback -- usually 'stream direct' which just shifts the MKV container to MP4 -- relatively easy work. And when I did have full transcode, it was either from h.264->h.264 with slightly different profile settings or MPEG-2 -> h.264. I had to configure it for the lowest quality transcoding settings in order to avoid interrupted playback, but it worked. I upgraded to fastest i5 that was offered about two years ago and it's handled everything quite well -- though h.265 transcoding takes substantially longer to start-up and seek than h.264 full transcodes.
I'm curious what modern Atom processors can handle. I know they've made some improvements to the chips, but is it enough, yet?
C2758 seems to handle one Plex transcode (H264->H264, maybe with AC3 to AAC) fine. If there's any particular benchmark you'd like me to run, let me know.
Can also confirm no issues with this transcoding on the C2758. I built a SuperMicro 4 drive NAS a few years ago based on this CPU and it has been very solid. Doesn't run well in Docker, but runs well baremetal.
The Atom is fine for Plex, just don't try to transcode any video, hah - it sucks at that. 99% of everything I watch doesn't need transcoding though. Sometimes the audio needs transcoding, but the Atom 230 in the FX160 handles that.
I have an old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop that can handle 2 streams transcoding at once with Plex. You can buy a refurb Core 2 Duo for less than $200. Why bother with an Atom?
As others have pointed out, there are definitely some flaws with the logic applied here.
> It’s faster, cheaper and still relatively small
Yes, the Optiplex is going to perform better at a lot of things. The prices I'm seeing are around $60 -- the Pi is either $10 for the Zero with WiFi or $45 for the "3" with a reasonably sized Micro SD card. Granted, your needs may include more storage than what's offered by a Micro SD card, so that would set the sticker price higher, but the Optiplex that was linked to didn't include storage, either. But the bigger area where the Pi is going to be less expensive is in power utilization. The Pi is really cheap to run. These things don't even need active cooling to run well.
But it's also not really fair to equate these two devices. It's not even fair to say 'for a home server' -- that all depends on what you're going to use it for. If you're using it as a low power home server for sharing files and/or basic web app, REST service or home automation hub and have no intention of doing processor intensive tasks like media re-encoding[0], the Pi is a good fit and economical to leave powered on all the time. My Plex server, in fact, points to a device that's a Pi competitor which has archived media on it.
Then, there's noise and heat. Provided spindle drives aren't used, Pis are completely silent and generate substantially less heat than a full-sized PC. I am fairly certain the Atom processor in that Dell has active cooling. Even if it's a heat-sink only design, those usually include ducting that feeds off one or more other fans in the device (which end up being more powerful/louder to handle cooling the extra components). Minimally, there's at least one fan running all the time. Yes, you can buy quiet fans (adding to the cost) and nearly eliminate this sound, but in my case, my Pi clone doesn't even have a heat-sink on the CPU. It shares a case with three, rather hot, drives (though I've designed it with ducting and separation to reduce the impact of this heat). It has been running that way for over a year without difficulties.
[0] The specific mention of Plex leads me to believe the author was targeting those of us who want a Plex Media Server on an RPi. I'm not sure how well Plex works on the Pi, but I use my Plex server with a Roku and many of my videos must be re-encoded to h.264/MP4 from h.265/MKV on the server in order to play them back -- I also have to re-encode to a lower bitrate when I'm remote. I'm not confident the Pi could handle those tasks.
[1] It's either a Banana Pro or Orange Pi; can't remember -- I haven't had to touch the hardware since I set it up. It's Ethernet attached with a 1TB SATA drive and two 2TB USB disks. The device handles the task perfectly. In fact, I only set it up because my i5 server case was too small to take on the storage, so I printed up a case to house the Pi clone and the drives. It also serves up a REST service that my SmartThings uses to control my garage door and older Pioneer receiver, as well as a node service that lets my Alexa control my Roku. I even had it set up to run Octoprint to control my 3D printer, but purchased a Pi 3 for that because I wanted to relocate the printer.
I use Plex on the FX160 and basically nothing needs to be transcoded. Streams fine to my PS4, Chromecast and iOS devices. The content I have is in H264 though, I don't leech/encode any H265 yet.
I hadn't thought about that - the Atom processor might not be sufficient for typical transcoding tasks, either. While it may perform better than the ARM, can it do a full transcode to H.264 -> H.264 at different profiles/bitrates or MPEG-2 to H.264? If it can, that would cover a lot and I don't think the ARM processor in the Pi would be up to that task. If it can't, then the added speed doesn't really help any since it wouldn't be fast enough to reach the threshold of usefulness.
I'm guessing that the Atom processor in that device can't handle H.265->H.264. I'm using a two-year-old i5 (top-end of that class of processor at the time) and while it manages, it's pretty close to the edge with the version of ffmpeg they're using.
If you're buying one to use as a server this won't matter to you, but if you want a tiny Linux or BSD desktop, you may want to look elsewhere. The video hardware is SiS Mirage, which has terrible support in non-Windows OSes.
Yeah, using one as a desktop with a GUI is a rubbish experience. Spend a little more and get an i5-2600 SFF box for like AU$150 and it's a vast improvement.
I use 2 pis as cable boxes (running kodi). For me the pi as a media server is appealing because it's size basically makes it part feel like it's built into the TV. There's no fan whirling or power adapter hanging around anywhere. It has never had any stuttering issues with HD content.
It's powerful enough for what I want to use it for and it's tiny enough as to be basically invisible. Could I get more bang for the buck? Sure. But there's something to be said for the qualitative aspects of hardware preferences.
I use my Raspberry Pi to play around with sensors (such as humidity, temperature, RFID, etc) through the GPIO pins. That's the main selling point, I think. It's an educational product more than anything.
This is why I bought mine as well - what language are you using to access the GPIO pins? I've been meaning to look into using Golang, but haven't seen many people using it for that.
I think people would be happy with two different Raspberry Pi like devices, one with tons of GPIO and one with real SATA and 1Gbe ports. Even just having USB 3.0 would be good enough for what most people want their Pi to do. Fortuneately there are other SBCs out there that can do the job but not with the huge range of out of the box compatible hardware and software that the Pi has. I've been thinking about the OLinuXino line of SBCs for some of my projects. At least the one benefit of having 1Gbe ports is that I can setup a network drive for less I/O intensive projects.
I've been using a $140 chromebox flashed with Ubuntu as an HTPC and seedbox. It works very well and has very nice IO (lots of USB 3, HDMI, gigabit, etc.).
The only minor problem I've run into is that the processor is just slow enough that it chokes on high-entropy 1080p video. 99.5% of the time it's fine, but if there's something on screen with lots of tiny objects moving in lots of different directions (a swarm of locusts, an explosion in space, etc.) the frame rate drops substantially. It makes perfect sense if you think about how video compression works. I just wish it had a tiny bit more oomph.
Edit: looks like it's not. Maybe I'll try to fix it later, but probably not. That should really work out of the box. The hardware definitely supports it, per vainfo.
Should work with mpv at least (I dont use VLC). You can use the --hwdec=vaapi switch to make sure its on, which I believe also needs --vo=opengl for best performance.
Still won't be good for a file server, backup server, media server if you care about decent write/read speeds. Sure it will prob read fast enough for your biggest 4K MKVs but those CPUs are always the limiting factor in disk IO performance. Get a fast SSD, get a platter disk - who cares! So you've got 100MB/s of throughput on your gigabit eth. Too bad! These CPUs do AT BEST 30-40MB/s write theoretical - most folks get around 10MB/s. Google the benchmarks. That's crap! Those Atom CPUs are the sorry excuse for a decade of cheap personal NAS devices (prob botnets now) with no balls.
And the article said it would be a pretty good Plex Server as long as you don't care about transcoding. Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of a Plex Server? If I wanted a small single use, flexible, media server, I would get an Nvidia Shield for $200.
My main usages with RPi 3 includes:
- SSH tunnel from outside when I concern about security / privacy
- Media box (Kodi runs pretty well)
- Running daemons (DDNS updates, torrent, etc)
- Running some nodejs scripts
RPi 3 does these very well, why bother with a more power-consuming box? Not to metion RPi 3 has WiFi builtin (I know it's slow, but good enough for my usage)
I tried to use mine as a media box, but as the article notes, rpi can't power an hdd over usb. And I am too lazy to get a powered usb hub and arrange a power cord for that too.
A giant difference between the two, which goes unmentioned here, is that the FX160 runs on AC power at 120 volts. If you have a deployment scenario where you already have 5 volts DC but not 120 volts AC, the pi obviously makes way more sense.
Great point. Also, the Pi can be powered off USB batteries, so you could run it basically anywhere for a non-trivial amount of time, really easily. The Pi's lack of reliance on wall power is one of it's neatest features, I think.
The inverse is also true - the FX160 runs off of 120/240V directly, which is rather convenient if you don't want to use a 5V DC power brick that's larger than the Pi itself. Makes for a rather clean installation if you're shoving it somewhere strange (which seems likely).
This usecase is more about running it as a homeserver, where i guess that limitation is not that important. Of course there are a lot of usecases where the Pi is the better choice.
In my case I run my RPi2 as my home server, but off-grid from my non-grid-tie solar PV section, which is a nominal 12V, so a single part (switching 7805 2A, well plus cap) gets my power sorted nicely...
4 or 8 cores at 2+ghz plus a very decent gpu. with a high end motherboard you get it for $100! and there is one itx motherboard that cames with a 20V input plug to not even need a psu!
best part: mine with a ssd and a hdd streaming movies to the tv in 1080p (supports 4k but i get tearing) de will only consume 35W!
If you have a microcenter near you, you get the cpu / ASRock mini-itx mobo (with dc input) for < $50. I have a couple of these in tiny m350 cases and have been very happy.
Another option is just to use an old laptop. This is what I tend to do for media servers, TV computers, and the like. People give away or throw away perfectly usable machines all the time.
form factor is a bit annoying, I do this with an old thinkpad and I'm thinking about finding one with a broken LCD to remove the screen assembly altogether and put the base onto a book shelf.
I used to do that for my media server/HTPC. The problem in my experience is that laptop fans are pretty noisy. Actually evenn the power supply can be noisy, many of them have a very audible AC hiss. Maybe it's because I tend to buy cheap laptops.
A few months ago I decided to build myself a super quiet replacement, I took a small well ventilated case[1], put an underclocked i3 in it, a fanless heatsink[2] on top, a super quiet power supply[3] and it's amazing. For about 350 euros I have a completely silent and rather powerful HTPC. A lot more expensive than the computer in TFA obviously, but well worth it if like me you can't stand fan noises.
I'd imagine it be prudent to remove the battery if that is the case (which you can't on many newish laptops). I know it's tempting to utilize that free UPS but I wouldn't trust a laptop battery that's pushed way passed the intended use.
I did use a laptop that way, and I think that I did knacker its battery prematurely, though I'd simply these days be more gentle about switching between it and external power, like I do with my network gear switching between mains and off-grid.
Is "pushed" the right word? Rather it seems like the battery is not doing much apart from a little "ambient" discharge for which it occasionally gets automatically topped back up to 100%.
For the plugged-in laptops I use as servers, I have a repeating task in my todo system to unplug and drain them once every couple of months. The intention being to keep the thing's own idea of its calibration honest, in case it ever gets used like a normal laptop again.
Well, I'm no expert but my thoughts are that the temperature alone is damaging for the battery (and it will be ~warm since it is basically inside the laptop). Unless you have a way to change it the charge will also be at 100% which is also not ideal.
The margins of error are quite small considering that they sometimes explode well within their intended use case (which is not powered on 24/7).
The consequences of a fire in a battery is quite severe, and unlike normal laptop usage you probably won't be around it when it starts (or, worse, you might be asleep).
So, I'd err on the safe side and buy a UPS that at least covers the intended use case. For something as efficient as a laptop it isn't expensive either.
This is a great point. I'd likely have a tough time buying a laptop that didn't have a removable battery but sometimes with hand-me-down, I don't have a choice.
Usually, though, by the time they become my HTPCs, the batteries are completely shot already and so I recycle them at work.
The irony is that most corporate class hardware will last until well beyond obsolescence before breaking. I've heard people say they don't want to buy a refurbished ThinkPad because they're worried about longevity.
Those things will outlast any consumer grade laptop you buy today.
True indeed. I still have a T22 and a T30, mothballed. I'm not sure what I'd even use them for these days... and the batteries crapped out long ago.
My T42 is also still useful enough to continue using, though its battery also succumbed to "always plugged in" syndrome.
My current daily driver is an i7-equipped X201 Tablet. While I don't have much use for the pen-based tablet mode, it was still a very nice laptop for a very nice price.
The X201 came with a good enough battery that I decided to set a maximum charge of 80% to (hopefully) make it last a few more years.
I've seen USB GPIO breakouts, but not very cheaply, and I suspect driver support might be an issue. Certainly controlling GPIOs via /sys is extremely convenient! Between that and the built-in Ethernet interface, I suspect a Raspberry Pi makes a better GPIO interface for a PC than almost anything else on the market.
Really ? Because this is trivial to make using a microcontroller. Or you can use any FT232 serial interface.
I mean I'd think you'd prefer an arduino for this application over pretty much everything else since you can quickly upload small programs to the arduino that keep the "fast" logic on the arduino.
Arduinos cost more than a lot of Pis, though. And the network interface of a Pi enables some really interesting capabilities that don't exist, or are harder to obtain, with a device that doesn't have one.
4 dollars, including shipping. At this price, they're pretty much disposable. Pi's seem to have bad shipping costs, so they're 20$/piece for the cheapest:
14 GPIO (although with hacks you can do more), including 10 bit DACs on all of them, and 4 with hardware PWM. Most have alternate functions, like I2C, that can be used.
I think ESP8266 boards (running something NodeMCU) are becoming the more popular replacements for Arduino. They're super cheap, and have integrated Wifi.
Cool thing about them is that you can write in C-like AVR code (like Arduino), or micro versions of Lua, Python, and other choices.
You may want to check out the rapidly growing number of RPi clones... cheaper and often more powerful, besides still having GPIO pins. You can find a nice list of options on the Armbian download page: https://www.armbian.com/download/
There's a lot of clones, which is a good thing, but they are kind of a mixed bag on software support.
The one advantage of the Raspberry Pi is it's the one with the most of everything. Other noble competitors, like the Beagle, are pretty good too but getting anything to run on them can be really frustrating.
It gets even worse when you buy really expensive SBCs from random small companies. You want support? They just ignore any emails because they either can't read your language, closed up shop, or just don't care to respond. Only good thing is that at least the hardware is amd64 and it uses drivers that are in the kernel.
I purchased one of these and installed CouchDB, Apache web server, and some webs I've made and it will serve those apps just fine to a small office full of desktops connected to a LAN.
I've made web apps for managing Contacts, Quotes, Invoices, Expenses, Income Reports, ToDo, Chat, and others. I can back up all my data to a remote server (IBM Cloudant for example), and to another Pi in-house as well.
And I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot.
Plus, it comes with all the apps already installed on Raspbian so it works well as a desktop PC too. That's a pretty sweet deal.
>I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot.
Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea the pi 3 could do that.
I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and a 3 B at home. I host my website using the 2 B with cloudflare in front of it [1], as well as use it as a login server, but every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted. The last time that happened was a couple of weeks ago and since I'm currently away from home there's nothing I can do to fix it until I get back so now my website is down and additionally I can't send data to my desktop computer for backup, though fortunately I have two external drives with me so I can have multiple copies of my data still just not at different physical locations.
Totally going to put the 3 B in charge of my website and have it boot from a USB stick instead of from SD.
> every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted.
You may want to check your power supply before switching to USB storage. In my case, the corrupt SD card turned out to be an issue with the power adapter I bought for the raspi Model 3B. Switching to a better 2A adapter fixed the issue.
I am powering the Raspberry Pi from the usb port of my router and would prefer not to have an additional power adapter. However the SD corruption issues also happened previously when I was using the Raspberry Pi for something else and was using a power adapter.
To be honest I think perhaps the SD card I am using is actually bad. I seem to recall that I lost some photos from the same SD card previously when I used it in a digital camera. So I could also try replacing the SD card if I haven't already but at that point I feel like a USB stick will be just as good anyway.
I intend to configure my Raspberry Pi to not write logs and such to persistent memory in order to reduce wear on the storage since such files are of no interest to me anyway, but haven't gotten around to do so yet. Still the files for my website will be on the USB stick though so therefore I wonder, will the read and write speed be ok even with USB? I think it probably will. Additionally I've been wishing to keep the website files themselves in memory as well (but to write to disk when they are changed ofc) but haven't gotten around to that either.
The network boot can be made to work on the RPi 2, I believe. You still need an sd card in there to host the updated boot ROM but it won't be used for anything except booting, so it should be pretty safe from corruption.
The only downsides to this setup is it take longer to boot and apps take longer to start. Since I never shut it off booting isn't an issue and from what I've noticed it's only the first time you load an app that is slow. If you quit and restart them they load pretty fast.
This is the forum post I followed to setup the Pi to boot from the HD, I think it may be newer than the one you found:
no, buy a third gen i5 laptop with a broken screen, or even just a motherboard from one. Lenovo X220/X230 motherboards (with 4xcore i5 ~3GHz) are $30-50. PCIE, USB 3.0, SATA, real 1Gbit ethernet, everything Raspee lacks.
I leave mine in original cases. There is maybe even a possibility of making it drastically smaller by cutting off right side pcb section with USB/audio/mpcie port, but I havent investigated it yet.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI'd go with a Qotom box for that, but something like this would be about as good and, at the cited prices, a fair bit cheaper - and wouldn't involve the same US Customs import encumbrance that I've found Qotom hardware to entail, besides. But I think it would depend on being able to find used FX160s cheaply, as the article describes, and since its description of a sudden glut in the used market seems written from an Australian perspective, I imagine that might be an issue elsewhere.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KX9OU58
http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
I've recently bought one of these and it's been great so far. Though its a NanoBSD currently you can squeeze an SSD in there.
A video with some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6O_j0-UZb4
https://web.archive.org/web/20170515001126/https://thesizzle...
Install a caching plugin!
Or, if you want a fast dev board, the Odroids are $35 to $60.
The Odroids are fast, yes, but they are stuck with old kernels in Linux, buggy drivers (especially video), and a very limited OS compatibility list overall. If you're developing with the Odroid as your target, fine, but for general purpose computing you're better off with the Pi if you want ARM, or else a cheap x86 box like the article mentions.
As for odroid, I mentioned it because one of the points in referenced article was lackluster speed on the Rpi. If the Rpi is fast enough for what you're doing, none of this is needed.
Odroid says it works with Ubuntu 16.04. that's the current LTS, isn't it?
The one the author links to on eBay has 2GB RAM installed. No HDD installed though.
The former is popularly taken over by the integrated system within TV / media player (yes, many of the newest DVD & BlueRay media players do come with a better, surprisingly [1], integrated system), and you can play media like Netflix / YouTube from your mobile phone.
The latter is somewhat a customized solution, depending on what you do. I would run on my old laptop, or I can run on a raspberry Pi (which is capable of running HD video at 1080p), plus a large SSD network storage device (or use "cloud" if you have a good Internet connectivity).
There are plenty options out there, but for a $60 deal (USD) is pretty good. Most big brands can easily cost you $100+ with just Atom CPU in it. I wouldn't mind getting one though, if it becomes available again.
[1]: Samsung BD-JM57C Streaming Blu-ray Player (love it)
I mean, almost every claim debatably, is an exaggeration or blatantly false.
As CFTM pointed out, the whole thing is a bunch of weak arguments for you to buy some old, out out lease hardware on ebay.
Or buy a known good product, spend the extra cash on the accessories you want, and get what you want.
TFA made a reasonable argument for why this was a great deal. I can't find any fault, and certainly it's not an ad.
The reality is that this little PC is a solid choice to consider for a low-end home server -- especially if you have a particular need/desire for x86[0]. They're different platforms that serve different purposes and a micro-desktop like this has a lot of good uses. I used to use a similar device as my playback PC and loved that I could play back every format without having something have to transcode it for me[1].
It didn't even cross my mind to think of that post as 'advertising' or that you might be the actual seller, and I use affiliate links any time I link to a product where I have an affiliate account. I think I've made $5 over a few years, so I wouldn't be inclined to think the inclusion of an affiliate link causes a post to be considered spammy or a motivation to spam. For me, it's just easier to click the associates banner at the top and get a short-link that way.
Personally speaking, I enjoyed the post and think it had plenty of value even though I didn't agree completely with the conclusion and decided to pull a 'Someone is Wrong on the Internet!'[2]. So to offset this small amount of grief you have received, consider this my 'Many Thanks for Sharing' and encouragement to continue to do so.
[0] Personally, I reload my computer enough and it's always painful for me to go through the steps of setting up my environment for cross-compiling to ARM. I never quite get it right on the first try and often give up half-way through, delaying getting things done that I want to do. If it's x86, I can compile locally and cp away.
[1] I'm not sure if that processor could handle H.265, but at the time I was running this device -- which later became my Plex server -- H.265 didn't exist. If it can play back h.265, that would make this quite a solid product for that purpose.
[2] And this being 10:30 PM, my time, I'm literally: https://xkcd.com/386/
Glad you enjoyed the post :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amlogic#Media_player_SoCs_.28S...
I have a question.. for anybody, what is the difference between using a PC as media server as OP describes, or using a little Android box thing like the Mi, or something like Apple TV?
Basically I have a MBP, and I'll be getting a TV soon, and I want to be able to easily watch dls on the TV, using a remote. And I'd prefer not to have my laptop doing the grunt work.
Any opinions/explanations appreciated! ta
There's a cognitive bias whereby we assume that if something seems wrong to us, nobody else could possibly hold that view in good faith (i.e. they must be astroturfing or shilling). But people hold opposing views in good faith all the time.
But I'd still own a number of raspberry pis since they're great for hacking or just to support a cool mission (in my opinion).
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06758215/filing-h...
Charities can make "investments" too.
AFAIK the RPi foundation is completely straight in this respect, just worth mentioning the general position for UK Charities IMO.
> we provide outreach and education to help more people access computing and digital making. We develop free resources to help people learn about computing and how to make things with computers, and train educators who can guide other people to learn
>Raspberry Pi, case, power adaptor AUD$73.26. Dell Optiplex FX160 around AUD$60
translated to USD:
>Raspberry Pi, case, power adaptor US $54.19. Dell Optiplex FX160 around US $44.39.
(I used Google to convert the currency, didn't look up prices.)
There are a few things that offset this, though. The eBay OptiPlex ships without RAM. The author points out that this adds a minimal $20AUD, but that offsets the sticker price difference. In addition, if Hacker News is the target audience and you folks are anything like me, I have a medium sized box filled with USB cables and power adapters -- more than half of which meet the specs to power a Pi, not to mention about 4 high-end multi-port units, one of which sits where my servers are and has available ports. Plus, on my nightstand next to me are three 16GB MicroSD cards that I could re-purpose for a Pi, so those costs are very efficient for me -- I'd just end up actually using something that's laying around.
Neither come with substantial storage, though. So you're going to be buying a drive to attach to either if you want to serve up video files or the likes.
This puts them about even at sticker price, but you're not leaving them in the box. You have to consider total cost of ownership with a PC just like with a car. The author states that these are silent but it has an HDD fan and it's unclear if there are other fans in the device -- these will wear. And then there's the cost of electricity. I couldn't find any data on power consumption at load/idle but a look at the specs indicates that this ships with a (rather economical/small) 50W power supply (it's 87% efficient). 50W for a PC is quite good, but it's awful compared against a Pi. The Pi is 1.4W idle and 3.7W at load[0]. Granted, more would be required for any external disks being added, but going SSD would be low power as well. Assuming the device will be 'always on', the Dell PC will cost substantially more.
[0] If this source is to be believed, anyway: https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
I had an older Atom device running Plex server for quite a while, but back then I almost never needed full transcoding for playback -- usually 'stream direct' which just shifts the MKV container to MP4 -- relatively easy work. And when I did have full transcode, it was either from h.264->h.264 with slightly different profile settings or MPEG-2 -> h.264. I had to configure it for the lowest quality transcoding settings in order to avoid interrupted playback, but it worked. I upgraded to fastest i5 that was offered about two years ago and it's handled everything quite well -- though h.265 transcoding takes substantially longer to start-up and seek than h.264 full transcodes.
I'm curious what modern Atom processors can handle. I know they've made some improvements to the chips, but is it enough, yet?
> It’s faster, cheaper and still relatively small
Yes, the Optiplex is going to perform better at a lot of things. The prices I'm seeing are around $60 -- the Pi is either $10 for the Zero with WiFi or $45 for the "3" with a reasonably sized Micro SD card. Granted, your needs may include more storage than what's offered by a Micro SD card, so that would set the sticker price higher, but the Optiplex that was linked to didn't include storage, either. But the bigger area where the Pi is going to be less expensive is in power utilization. The Pi is really cheap to run. These things don't even need active cooling to run well.
But it's also not really fair to equate these two devices. It's not even fair to say 'for a home server' -- that all depends on what you're going to use it for. If you're using it as a low power home server for sharing files and/or basic web app, REST service or home automation hub and have no intention of doing processor intensive tasks like media re-encoding[0], the Pi is a good fit and economical to leave powered on all the time. My Plex server, in fact, points to a device that's a Pi competitor which has archived media on it.
Then, there's noise and heat. Provided spindle drives aren't used, Pis are completely silent and generate substantially less heat than a full-sized PC. I am fairly certain the Atom processor in that Dell has active cooling. Even if it's a heat-sink only design, those usually include ducting that feeds off one or more other fans in the device (which end up being more powerful/louder to handle cooling the extra components). Minimally, there's at least one fan running all the time. Yes, you can buy quiet fans (adding to the cost) and nearly eliminate this sound, but in my case, my Pi clone doesn't even have a heat-sink on the CPU. It shares a case with three, rather hot, drives (though I've designed it with ducting and separation to reduce the impact of this heat). It has been running that way for over a year without difficulties.
[0] The specific mention of Plex leads me to believe the author was targeting those of us who want a Plex Media Server on an RPi. I'm not sure how well Plex works on the Pi, but I use my Plex server with a Roku and many of my videos must be re-encoded to h.264/MP4 from h.265/MKV on the server in order to play them back -- I also have to re-encode to a lower bitrate when I'm remote. I'm not confident the Pi could handle those tasks.
[1] It's either a Banana Pro or Orange Pi; can't remember -- I haven't had to touch the hardware since I set it up. It's Ethernet attached with a 1TB SATA drive and two 2TB USB disks. The device handles the task perfectly. In fact, I only set it up because my i5 server case was too small to take on the storage, so I printed up a case to house the Pi clone and the drives. It also serves up a REST service that my SmartThings uses to control my garage door and older Pioneer receiver, as well as a node service that lets my Alexa control my Roku. I even had it set up to run Octoprint to control my 3D printer, but purchased a Pi 3 for that because I wanted to relocate the printer.
I'm guessing that the Atom processor in that device can't handle H.265->H.264. I'm using a two-year-old i5 (top-end of that class of processor at the time) and while it manages, it's pretty close to the edge with the version of ffmpeg they're using.
http://www.sayresd.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/PC-Dell-De...
There are some Amazon sellers who have put together complete systems running Windows 7 or 10 for around US $100:
https://smile.amazon.com/Dell-OptiPlex-FX160-1-6GHz-Windows/...
If you're buying one to use as a server this won't matter to you, but if you want a tiny Linux or BSD desktop, you may want to look elsewhere. The video hardware is SiS Mirage, which has terrible support in non-Windows OSes.
> Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SP2) in China only
For me, a let-down is that it doesn't have HDMI though.
It's powerful enough for what I want to use it for and it's tiny enough as to be basically invisible. Could I get more bang for the buck? Sure. But there's something to be said for the qualitative aspects of hardware preferences.
The only minor problem I've run into is that the processor is just slow enough that it chokes on high-entropy 1080p video. 99.5% of the time it's fine, but if there's something on screen with lots of tiny objects moving in lots of different directions (a swarm of locusts, an explosion in space, etc.) the frame rate drops substantially. It makes perfect sense if you think about how video compression works. I just wish it had a tiny bit more oomph.
Edit: looks like it's not. Maybe I'll try to fix it later, but probably not. That should really work out of the box. The hardware definitely supports it, per vainfo.
"Neither fast nor efficient, but it surely is slow!"
RPi 3 does these very well, why bother with a more power-consuming box? Not to metion RPi 3 has WiFi builtin (I know it's slow, but good enough for my usage)
Here's mine:
thisisthebus.com
4 or 8 cores at 2+ghz plus a very decent gpu. with a high end motherboard you get it for $100! and there is one itx motherboard that cames with a 20V input plug to not even need a psu!
best part: mine with a ssd and a hdd streaming movies to the tv in 1080p (supports 4k but i get tearing) de will only consume 35W!
A few months ago I decided to build myself a super quiet replacement, I took a small well ventilated case[1], put an underclocked i3 in it, a fanless heatsink[2] on top, a super quiet power supply[3] and it's amazing. For about 350 euros I have a completely silent and rather powerful HTPC. A lot more expensive than the computer in TFA obviously, but well worth it if like me you can't stand fan noises.
[1]http://www.coolermaster.com/case/mini-itx-elite-series/elite... [2]https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/alpine-11-passive.html [3]http://www.bequiet.com/en/powersupply/248
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
For the plugged-in laptops I use as servers, I have a repeating task in my todo system to unplug and drain them once every couple of months. The intention being to keep the thing's own idea of its calibration honest, in case it ever gets used like a normal laptop again.
The margins of error are quite small considering that they sometimes explode well within their intended use case (which is not powered on 24/7).
The consequences of a fire in a battery is quite severe, and unlike normal laptop usage you probably won't be around it when it starts (or, worse, you might be asleep).
So, I'd err on the safe side and buy a UPS that at least covers the intended use case. For something as efficient as a laptop it isn't expensive either.
Usually, though, by the time they become my HTPCs, the batteries are completely shot already and so I recycle them at work.
http://www.frys.com/product/8845262
Just just got a W zero for $24 CAD shipped (Vancouver)
The irony is that most corporate class hardware will last until well beyond obsolescence before breaking. I've heard people say they don't want to buy a refurbished ThinkPad because they're worried about longevity.
Those things will outlast any consumer grade laptop you buy today.
My T42 is also still useful enough to continue using, though its battery also succumbed to "always plugged in" syndrome.
My current daily driver is an i7-equipped X201 Tablet. While I don't have much use for the pen-based tablet mode, it was still a very nice laptop for a very nice price.
The X201 came with a good enough battery that I decided to set a maximum charge of 80% to (hopefully) make it last a few more years.
I mean I'd think you'd prefer an arduino for this application over pretty much everything else since you can quickly upload small programs to the arduino that keep the "fast" logic on the arduino.
https://www.banggood.com/ATmega328P-Nano-V3-Controller-Board...
14 GPIO (although with hacks you can do more), including 10 bit DACs on all of them, and 4 with hardware PWM. Most have alternate functions, like I2C, that can be used.
Cool thing about them is that you can write in C-like AVR code (like Arduino), or micro versions of Lua, Python, and other choices.
btw ESP32 are reaching the 6-7$ range for module + serial board.
The one advantage of the Raspberry Pi is it's the one with the most of everything. Other noble competitors, like the Beagle, are pretty good too but getting anything to run on them can be really frustrating.
https://www.wdc.com/products/wdlabs/wd-picompute-centre.html...
I've made web apps for managing Contacts, Quotes, Invoices, Expenses, Income Reports, ToDo, Chat, and others. I can back up all my data to a remote server (IBM Cloudant for example), and to another Pi in-house as well.
And I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot.
Plus, it comes with all the apps already installed on Raspbian so it works well as a desktop PC too. That's a pretty sweet deal.
Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea the pi 3 could do that.
I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and a 3 B at home. I host my website using the 2 B with cloudflare in front of it [1], as well as use it as a login server, but every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted. The last time that happened was a couple of weeks ago and since I'm currently away from home there's nothing I can do to fix it until I get back so now my website is down and additionally I can't send data to my desktop computer for backup, though fortunately I have two external drives with me so I can have multiple copies of my data still just not at different physical locations.
Totally going to put the 3 B in charge of my website and have it boot from a USB stick instead of from SD.
Searched and found a post with more details about this from the Raspberry Pi guys: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-i-usb-mas...
[1]: https://github.com/eriknstr/interweb
You may want to check your power supply before switching to USB storage. In my case, the corrupt SD card turned out to be an issue with the power adapter I bought for the raspi Model 3B. Switching to a better 2A adapter fixed the issue.
To be honest I think perhaps the SD card I am using is actually bad. I seem to recall that I lost some photos from the same SD card previously when I used it in a digital camera. So I could also try replacing the SD card if I haven't already but at that point I feel like a USB stick will be just as good anyway.
I intend to configure my Raspberry Pi to not write logs and such to persistent memory in order to reduce wear on the storage since such files are of no interest to me anyway, but haven't gotten around to do so yet. Still the files for my website will be on the USB stick though so therefore I wonder, will the read and write speed be ok even with USB? I think it probably will. Additionally I've been wishing to keep the website files themselves in memory as well (but to write to disk when they are changed ofc) but haven't gotten around to that either.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/tree/master/har...
This is the forum post I followed to setup the Pi to boot from the HD, I think it may be newer than the one you found:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
Worked like a charm.
That kit cost $109.99
Let's do some math...
From WD: Case: 10.99 Power Supply: 12.99 375GB HD: 37.49
From anywhere else: Pi 3: 40.00 Cables: 10.00
Total: 111.47
You still have no keyboard or mouse.
also http://hackaday.com/2017/04/17/broken-yoga-becomes-firewall/