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Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
- thecodeman 6y agoI did something similar pi4 500gb ssd POE and small lcd . https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/hrp8sl/i_designed_and_printed_this_case_for_my_nas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/hrp8sl/i_desi...
- Legogris 6y agoUnless you specifically need the 8GB RAM (where Rpi 4 is the only contender in this range as of right now AFAIK), IMO for server use-cases it'd be better to consider either Odroid C4 or Rock Pi 4 - both offer better storage interfaces than USB/microSD natively. Also easier to run vanilla Debian/Ubuntu (or Armbian, which is very close to vanilla but can be easily built custom for either board preconfigured with necessary kernel modules/dtbs/boot loader/drivers/firmware for each board).
- m463 6y agoI have many pis, but when it comes to making a mini server, wouldn't it be worth it to spring for a low end intel machine, or used mini-pcs? They already come with things like power supplies, RTC+battery, on-off switches, sata and/or m.2, expandable memory, etc.
- Legogris 6y agoMaybe, depends on what your priorities are! Personally I use ARM SBCs to get physically separate hosts for things like Consul/Vault/Nomad servers, k8s control plane, some monitoring instances, workers for loads that don't need blazing single-thread performance, etc. This way I can run something close to "best practices" HA redundant clusters while staying low on purchase and electricity costs, and my whole setup can fit in a suitcase if I need to move. Some of the things you mention (m.2, RTC, switches) are things that are either included or cheap and easy add-ons to the boards I mentioned. Another nice upside is the low power means it's easier to power them via PoE, so you don't need a power supply in the first place. I also try to go as far as I can in the direction of libre/open software/firmware/hardware, which means I try to minimize the reliance on Intel and AMD CPUs.
- hinkley 6y agoI’m using my old Anker charging station to power most of my SBCs. I think the “it depends” also depends on what you think the next ten years holds for ARM vs x64. Getting some more hours in dealing with ARM ‘servers‘ might be a decent way to hedge your bets.
- lultimouomo 6y agoAKA the scooter computer: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/
- megous 6y agoCan it idle at 1W? I'll be running the server all the time, so every watt counts.
- bullen 6y agoIdle for the 4 is around 3W, peak 7W.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoI don't know if things have improved but traditionally every other alternative SBC had better hardware but was stuck in one image provided by the vendor that was never updated and buggy. Has the situation improved, i.e. can you just run apt upgrade on an Odroid C4? Can you run Arch on it?
- hddherman 6y agoThe Armbian project has been a pretty good platform for various boards. The support will be different from board to board, but personally had a great experience with it on an Orange Pi Zero. https://www.armbian.com/ https://www.armbian.com/
- hinkley 6y agoI haven’t dug very far yet but it seems to be doing okay on the nanopi boards so far.
- apple4ever 6y agoI've run into that exact situation too. The Pi is the only SBC with an excellent OS ecosystem.
- tssva 6y agoThere are official Ubuntu server releases available for the RPi2-4. Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions are available.
- justin66 6y ago> better storage interfaces than USB/microSD natively. For this micro-server form factor, with a tiny little board in a tiny little case, what is a better storage form factor than a little portable SSD connected via USB 3? (I wouldn't be wild about using a microSD card for a server that relied much on storage)
- novok 6y agoA direct m.2 or sata slot so you don't have to deal with USB annoyances.
- justin66 6y agoSince the Pi people finally got USB boot finished for the Pi 4, I'm not sure what USB annoyances are left to worry about? That's really why I asked the question. A USB 3 SSD seems about as trouble-free as a storage device can possibly be.
- the_pwner224 6y agoA M.2 SSD is more trouble free. I recently built a desktop computer. It uses a 6x6 inch mini-ITX motherboard. The motherboard has a CPU and 2 sticks of RAM in it, raising the height to about 2 inches. The SSD goes inside the motherboard in the M.2 slot. Aside from this 6x6x2" unit, the only other things are: - the gigantic graphics card - not necessary on these type of computers - the power supply unit - standard USB unit for these - and the CPU cooler which is a big hunk of metal sticking out and raising the total height to about 6 inches - again not necessary, maybe a tiny passive heatsink M.2 is faster and lets you put a tiny SSD (literally just a PCB with flash chips on it) inside the thing instead of having a large external USB SSD with a cable to connect. So in the end you have a super compact computer that is basically just one PCB with another PCB inside it and maybe a tiny heatsink.
- justin66 6y agoIt's a slightly different paradigm, that's for sure. It feels technically neater to interface a little more directly with the storage hardware. I'm not sure how much I'd give up for that, though. > having a large external USB SSD with a cable to connect. The Samsung t5 and t7 SSDs I'm using with RPi 4s are about the size of a credit card (a stack of five credit cards, I guess). The tiny, very solid flirc cases for the Pis aren't much bigger, and dissipate heat beautifully. I like this solution a lot more than I anticipated I would.
- hinkley 6y agoI have a nanopc T4 with a rockchip and 4Gb that’s been moldering away on a shelf for a year and a half. Finally getting it up and working. Armbian isn’t so bad. Full sized hdmi port, USB-C with DisplayPort, gigE, and connectors for two WiFi antennae, and an M.2 4x slot on the backside of the board that would be great for an nVME card. It also has two screw holes and a power header for mounting a heat sink.
- pengaru 6y agoI don't understand why you would bother with this when you can pick up a second-hand Thinkpad for so cheap which brings a builtin UPS and far more performance, RAM, and IO options.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoWhat about power(electricity) consumption?
- monadic2 6y agoArchitecture, form factor, access to pins, scale, power.
- WaxProlix 6y agoAs someone who's grown tired of a flaky rpi connected to an external drive, is there a generation to shoot for in terms of low price to reasonable performance?
- colordrops 6y agoI use a powered USB hub and it got rid of my flakiness problems.
- akhilcacharya 6y agoYeah I’m in the same boat right now. I want an always on machine to connect a disk to that doesn’t draw too much power. I looked at NUCs but they seem far too expensive for my usecase.
- mclehman 6y agoI was able to swing $230 total for two x230s with the base i5 and ssds last fall/winter (actually three, but the third doesn't really count (arrived damaged, seller initiated a refund then ghosted, got a full refund from ebay)). If you're really lucky, you can find a computraced one for super cheap ($85 in my case) and then coreboot it. That said, x220s and x230s seem to have gotten more expensive since then, I haven't seen any similarly good deals lately.
- 6y ago
- mastrsushi 6y agoAn ARM based server almost sounds like an oxymoron.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoWhy so? Even cloud giants are moving in that direction[1]. When next generation Mac Mini with Apple Silicon comes out, data centers using that would be running Apple Server packages on that. In fact I've been running my production applications on ARM servers for ~a year and it has resulted in greater capital efficiency. I've been using Pi 2 with USB storage as a publicly hosted git server for over 5 years used by multiple users. [1]https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
- sliken 6y agoHeh, the fastest HPC cluster on the top 500 list is arm. Amusingly #2, #3, and #4 aren't x86-64 either. Number 5 is, but mainly because the xeons are handling I/O for the real heavy lifting on the matrix-2000 accelerators. The first pure x86-64 cluster is #8. So the performance story is changing quickly, and arm is just getting started.
- lioeters 6y agoJapan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer https://top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-powered-supercomputer/ https://top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-powe... (June 2020) > The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. > Fugaku is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops). > The new system is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
- zelly 6y agoI got a Raspberry Pi 4 and naively thought that because it was ARM it used little power and didn't need fans. In a few weeks the board melted and now won't turn on. Was only running a few programs.
- vaxman 6y agoDon’t do it! For (your own) source code or valuables, you need ECC memory and a capacitor on the power supply for your storage device which, by the way, should not be prone to corruption when the device is vibrated a little too hard causing electrical shorts in the SD-card or USB connectors! Backups aren’t the answer either, in fact backups can trigger RAM errors (especially with encryption and compression enabled) that may only ever be occurring during backups leading to..silently corrupted backups.
- gambiting 6y agoIs this missing an /s at the end? All of this is true, but come on, 99% of regular people don't need any of this stuff. And pretty much no one actually needs ECC memory outside of professional setting.
- vaxman 6y agoI tell yah there is nothing sadder than some poor CPA who has lost all of his client files and some of his baby's pictures when the Fusion Drive in his iMac failed (what a horrible piece of technology) only to discover that their backups are all bad because whenever the program kicked-in, it caused a failure mode on their cheap-azz third-party RAM DIMM that was otherwise unnoticed due to lack of ECC support. So when you say "pretty much no one" are you missing an /s at the end?
- gambiting 6y agoLet's combine two facts - virtually no consumer desktop, laptop, phone or tablet ships with ECC memory, yet somehow, nearly everyone is successfully using their computing devices for both pleasure and work, including backups. Yes, failures happen, but they are so incredibly rare that recommending people at home to buy ECC ram is in the same league as recommending getting a double PSU or a UPS for home use to prevent data loss in my mind. Technically correct, but in practice you're reducing the chances of losing your data from 0.0001% to 0.0001% or something equally negligible. There are actual, real, impact steps that anyone can take to improve their data safety - ECC memory is not one of them.
- colordrops 6y agoA lot of skepticism in this thread. I've got a pi4 4GB running Ubuntu server, acting as a SMB file server, Plex media server, Mopidy music server, Spotify Connect endpoint, video recorder for my two outdoor IP cameras, and a Minecraft server for my kids, all running simultaneously. And it's not breaking a sweat, not even getting close to full memory or CPU utilization. I do use a USB nvme SSD enclosure for storage to be fair, and it's only stable when using a powered USB hub.
- tjpnz 6y agoI've been using mine for Plex and Deluge the previous 6-months or so. In terms of performance it's been all but flawless.
- rumanator 6y agoI have a couple of RPis running Raspbian with a SMB server, and they keep on ticking without a hitch. The only problem I ever experience was when I tried to run a RPi4 as a desktop with a 4k tv. Although everything worked out of the box, sometimes the system stopped responding.
- colordrops 6y agoI have a 4k monitor and it works but it's too slow with Minecraft so we run it at 1080p
- tyingq 6y agoUsed Lenovo Tiny M92p/M93p units make a nicer solution for this, to me. The enclosure is already there, and no janky USB storage to deal with.
- grugagag 6y agoThats not a bad option but it’s a huge dif in price, specs, size. It really depends on your needs and wants. The pi’s are very tempting because they could be incorporated in many small spaces. Somebody else mentions that an used laptop has better specs and while true it misses the point. Rpis are ubiquitous, small, interchangeable, etc And the price will most likely go down even further (in terms of specs and compared to other options). I persobally welcome them even if i dont own any yet
- rumanator 6y agoA Lenovo M92p is about 6x the price of a RPi, and the noise/form factor can't possibly be compared. If you really want to compare a 200$ desktop with a 40$ SoC then you should aim for stuff such as those mini PC's/thin clients from Asus, which nowadays even ship with Ryzen processors.
- tyingq 6y agoThe $40 SoC isn't $40 after you the drive, power supply, enclosure, etc. There's a parts list in the article. I don't think the 4GB bare RPi is $40 anyway, it's higher. And a used Lenovo Tiny is easy to find for much less than $200. $100 shipped without an SSD, $140 with one. You're exaggerating both ends.
- Legogris 6y agoYou can go cheaper, though. Parts from Ali: Stackable plastic frame for 4 pis + basic heatsinks ~= 5$ MicroUSB PoE injector (removes the need for PSU) ~= 3.5$
- rumanator 6y ago> The $40 SoC isn't $40 after you the drive, power supply, enclosure, etc. That's true, but we can break cost down easily. Right now there are RPi4 packs with power supply, enclosure, and both passive and active coolers for less than 15$. Storage depends on your taste, but you can buy 64GB USB pen drives or micro SD cards for less than 10$, or 1TB external HDD for less than 50$. Thus for a total less than 100$ you can have a brand new server up and running. I'm talking about stuff you can simply add to your shopping cart and get it shipped to your doorstep in a few days with zero research. These prices were literally taken from the first search result that popped into amazon. Better yet, this option involves zero time wasted betting on whether end-of-life hardware still has a few months left in them.
- mirchiseth 6y agoI have a RPi4 with 2GB running Home Assistant which besides connecting all the smart/iot devices also hosts - BitWarden for password manager backend - AdGuard Home for ad blocking and local DNS server - OctoPrint for my 3D printer
- fossuser 6y agoThis website is pretty cool, but I can't really find out what it is? Looks like it's a magazine? Is there any context, none of the articles have dates or an explanation about what it is/who makes it.
- ajmadesc 6y agoThe guy has a hackeresque hardware YouTube channel and hit a home run with the design imo. N-O-D-E
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoHe makes awesome YouTube videos on various small electronics projects like this, including some more complex ones with custom PCBs and stuff. The website is more used as a reference/script for the videos, and the videos are much better if you actually want to see the projects visually. I’m a big fan of his Casio F91W mods and his Pi Zero projects. His overall design/aesthetics are flawless too. https://www.youtube.com/c/NODEtv https://www.youtube.com/c/NODEtv
- petejames 6y agoIntel NUCs for x86 K8/Docker servers. Used units are very cheap on ebay/Craigslist.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoWe've been running a Raspberry pi 3 smb/print server for a few months now. It was also our wifi access point for a little while. We have it hooked into a 7-port USB 3.0 hub for removable storage. Raspberry pi is also ideal as a command and control server for IP gadgets running hacked firmwares such as cameras and doorknobs and ACs and stuff. It is better to run cameras on on a separate wifi channel/PHY to save bandwidth, store to local server, rsync over to off-site backup once a day. All of this can be done with Pi, ethernet cable and a cheap usb wifi interface.
- ratiolat 6y agoI am waiting for AMD based "NUC", because I don't want to give money to Intel. The reason I want a AMD based computer is to run vanilla Debian on it. Vanilla debian does not run on Raspberry unfortunately. Currently I'm running Odroid XU4, but I need more ram and horsepower.
- lysp 6y agoI'm keeping an eye out for 4800u based NUC.
- sdflhasjd 6y agoHave you seen the Asus PN50? https://www.asus.com/Mini-PCs/Mini-PC-PN50/ https://www.asus.com/Mini-PCs/Mini-PC-PN50/
- varispeed 6y agoIt has Intel Wi-Fi...
- sdflhasjd 6y agoThat's a shame. Looks like it's an M.2 module, so you could replace it I suppose.
- bootlooped 6y agoThe second image on that page is hilariously wrong on scale. The USB port is about as wide as the caps lock key on the keyboard. They're supposed to be touting the small size of the unit and actually made it look bigger. Is it really that hard to just put the thing on a desk and take a real picture of it?
- Youden 6y agoHow about https://shop.udoo.org/products/bolt.html https://shop.udoo.org/products/bolt.html? You can also look at https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions.
- 6y ago
- tssva 6y agoIf you don't care about the internal SSD drive than the Argon One case would be a nice alternative to this. It is a nice looking case which also moves all the ports to one side. While not the cheapest case it is likely less expensive than getting all the parts together for this design.