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Why would I pay 539 eurodollars for a pi when I could buy a reasonable consumer-grade PC for that money? or just go with an actual enterprise server, although u
by dusted 4y ago
Why would I pay 539 eurodollars for a pi when I could buy a reasonable consumer-grade PC for that money? or just go with an actual enterprise server, although used?
- gambiting 4y agoYou wouldn't, it's just a "cool" little project. The only advantage this has over a normal server that I can think of is size and power consumption.
- loxias 4y agoAnd even the thin mini PCs have fairly low power consumption these days. I got one with dual gig ethernet for $150, x86_64, works great. Similar ones for $100 you could easily hang a few large drives off of. Install a base OS, then docker compose a few services. Or buy a half dozen and deploy k8s. Boom, "A cheap tiny personal server self hosting" (with COTS parts).
- swinglock 4y agoWhat did you find? I'm looking for something like that. Should be good for a router.
- loxias 4y agoThat's what I'm using mine for! I'll make a post with the parts list and software install steps in a month or so if it would help anyone out. I bought https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GK2QSY1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GK2QSY1, and a few alternatives, and I'm going to benchmark their performance under heavy load (using a much studlier machine to generate traffic). These mini PCs are getting to be _really cheap_. Cheap enough that my home infra is moving towards a tiny mini PC ($100 or less) attached to every pair of monitors, keyboards, and the network, and a central server to do actual work.
- pi-rat 4y agoAnother option is to buy a used "thin client". 1/10th the price, very similar power usage, small size. Some of them got room for a drive or even a quad intel nic (via pcie)
- chillfox 4y agoYou shouldn't. A Pi (even the 8G one) is seriously under powered and lacks a hardware clock. I recently went through the exercise of setting up a Pi for a Minecraft server only have to replace it with an office desktop within the week because it couldn't handle it when my friends were on. Turned out to be an expensive lesson, the Pi is a toy for solo tinkering and nothing more. edit: I even tried overclocking the Pi and dialing down the simulation distance in Minecraft.
- codazoda 4y agoTo be fair, Minecraft is heavy. Doesn’t mean I’d spend this money on a pi, but I’m probably not the target.
- planb 4y agoWow really? That seems to be a minecraft problem. I run openhab (which is a quite resource heavy java app), home assistant, influxdb, grafana and a bunch of data loggings scripts off a 4GB Pi and for a while even had the unifi controller running on it. All the scripts still run instantly and interactive use is possible without problems. I found the main reason for high load or lags is when the SD card breaks - which happens approximately every two years under such heavy use. Yes, I know you can boot from USB, but you should have a working and tested backup strategy nevertheless and I always keep a spare one around.
- doubled112 4y agoThis argument has been going since the Pi came out. I'd agree most people shouldn't. They should just get a NUC and save themselves the headaches. If you know what you're getting into, though, and build to it's lack of strength you can go pretty far. Current inflated prices are a hard no from me. Minecraft servers are likely the heaviest of the ~15 services I run at home. You chose a service that I wouldn't have expected to work. My Pi 4 4GB runs an MPD server that outputs to a HiFiBerry DAC, Zabbix and Grafana. It's done so smoothly for about a year now. At one time it acceptably ran Nextcloud, Gitea, Matrix Synapse, Vaultwarden and a file server in systemd containers. At another time, it replaced an old AMD e350 machine I was using for backups - the Pi 4 was faster than that old desktop. The bottleneck was the CPU load when transferring data over SSH.
- ycombinete 4y agoWhat is a eurodollar? I thought the prices on the website were in Euros?
- oakesm9 4y agoNot OP, but I think the joke is that 1€ ~= $1 now so they can be thought of as a single currency.
- dusted 4y agoOP: Yes, that, euros or dollars, well, "the common currency" and also a reference to the cyberpunk game :)
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y agoWell, in this case the distinction is actually useful because in Europe you will be charged more for this product as they show the price without VAT on the main product page - when you try to check out they will add VAT.
- type0 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar
- ThinkBeat 4y agoI dont think the saynig it knows this but Eurodollar is a real concept https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp#:~:text=What%20Is%20the%20Eurodollar%3F,Reserve%20Board%2C%20including%20reserve%20requirements https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp#:~:text=....
- ianai 4y agoTurn-key. Buy this and use it, if I understand what they're offering correctly. Hopefully with more privacy than is likely with current offerings. If you're capable of implementing this with cheaper hardware it's probably not for you, but maybe someone you know?
- ghgr 4y agoWith the current electricity prices in Germany you'd be paying around 30 €/month for a 100 W always-on server. And enterprise servers idle at around 200-250 W, so there's that. Compare that to a RPi that idles at ~5 W.
- feet 4y agoThe markup is massive though, aren't raspi something like 40 USD? Are you really getting another 500 worth of value from this?
- dagw 4y agoaren't raspi something like 40 USD? They seem to be using the 8GB RP4, which is currently around 100€. Also it comes with a 2 TB SSD for storage which is probably another 150-200€. A 2 port SATA backplane/adapter is probably 20-50€, Power supply, fans and wifi/bluetooth antenna is maybe an additional 30-50€. Even the cheapest case will set you back another 10-20€. So all told the markup isn't as bad as you're making out. Still an open question if it's worth it or not though.
- dublin 4y agoFYI, the high-priced PiBox config includes TWO each 2 GB SSDs (which you can stripe and/or mirror), so the price is not really at all unreasonable when you consider the cost of the drives alone are about half the asking price. And just try to get a high spec (8 GB) CM4 these days: Most places are quoting 52 week (indefinite) lead times. The PiBox team managed to negotiate delivery on a big enough batch of these to do their first production run. Color me impressed. FWIW, I've got a PiBox on order (w/o the drives), and I think the price is VERY reasonable. (No relationship other than waiting customer.) The PiBox "mainboard" that hosts the CM4 has much better I/O capabilities than a garden variety RPi 4. I'm actually going to be using mine for a small, light NAS and application server, and I'm confident it will work well.
- GuB-42 4y agoThere is a serious shortage of Raspberry Pis, sold out everywhere. Here, they are using the Pi 4 8GB, which is normally 75€, but expect to pay double if you want one now. They also sell the box without the Pi, SSDs, antenna and fan for 150€, it is up to you to decide if the price is justified, I think it is a bit on the expensive side but not unreasonably so. But if you intend to DIY the same configuration they are selling for 540€, you won't get that much cheaper.
- a-saleh 4y agoIf you need low power? If you don't care about power consumption, being fanless, small, then yeah, you will find better bang for buck.