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This is a very useful way to retire old laptops. I have a dell business laptop that is rocking an Ivy-bridge quad core. It’s over 10 years now and it’s still r
by LASR 4y ago
This is a very useful way to retire old laptops. I have a dell business laptop that is rocking an Ivy-bridge quad core.
It’s over 10 years now and it’s still running a few low power VMs - pihole and home assistant.
But more recently I’ve been moving my workloads to the 2012 Mac Mini i7s quads. Marketplace has them for <$100 if you look carefully. Bought three of those for just $50 + $30 SSD upgrade.
Highly recommended vs the RPi.
- Spooky23 4y agoThe other awesome way to do this is old thin clients. You can get a HP t620 or t630 (or the Wyse equivalent) for <$75. They usually have AMD SoCs and can take M2 SSDs.
- indigodaddy 4y agoAssuming the Dell and HP thin clients could be booted from a USB flash drive somehow as well?
- Spooky23 4y agoAbsolutely! They are just little PCs. I have a little Dell 3040 that only has 8GB of storage that’s a pita to upgrade and do this. I use a Samsung external flash drive to store surveillance video in a friends barn.
- numpad0 4y agoModel dependent, but a lot of “thin” clients are just x64 PCs with Atom or AMD GX CPUs, with M.2 disks, BIOS menus and all. Zero clients are usually more exotic in unique ways.
- shoo 4y ago> old thin clients yes! i ran a small personal app (postgres, background processes, tiny web app) on a wyse thin client for years. low power consumption, dead quiet. there's a great site here re: repurposing cheap old thin clients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
- rektide 4y agoI used to be super interested in thin clients, after some small DEC units got popular-ish for being turned into Linux wifi APs. And I'd follow every embedded core release with anticipation. But these days I mostly have a bitter outlook towards this segment. They are exceedingly slow at adopting new cores, even when say AMD has a drop in replacement for them. The commonly seen AMD GX-420GI is a 2016 release, a 28nm final/4th generation Bulldozer, which isnt terrible, but isnt power efficient & pretty underwhelming. Thin clients are no longer mass-market items, now kind of botique gear, and costs are correspondingly high. The one liter business mini pc market has, in my view, completely overtaken this plodding botique field. It refreshes designs regularly, there is huge volume/good resale, a little more expandability, better features. The more modern cores mean way better power efficiency (albeit there is usually an 8w idle which isnt fantastic).
- Spooky23 4y ago100% agreed. At the “high end” it’s a licensing play to avoid the Microsoft license. At the low end, it’s a weird volume business. I buy lots of 10,000 and get 50-60% discounts for the cheaper Linux devices. At the low quantity price they don’t make any sense as you can source quantity 1 shitty PCs within a few dollars of a thin client at low volume. Also Chromebooks can help you deliver a much cheaper solution by reducing server side concurrency. I always suspected that Microsoft did something in the backend to poison the product as PC management is such a PITA and cash cow. For task users, my company is replacing PCs soley because of Windows support. (Aka $30-50/unit to MS)
- gymbeaux 4y agoYou’re paying a premium to get old macs instead of old NUCs. Best value is a NUC or SFF/thin client from Dell, HP or Lenovo.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoNUCs I can see, but are thin clients good value for anything but low-power always-on workloads? I would naively expect them to be cheap but have weak CPUs and insufficient memory for running anything that uses significant compute (either fewer large things, which is painfully common, or many smaller services).
- Tsiklon 4y agoGiven the level of compute power in a thin client now a days, are they much different from a NUC? What my work (financial services) calls a thin client is really just a super small form factor PC.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoAh, perhaps I'm out of date then; when I say thin client I'm still thinking of the old Wyse box in my junk box with a Celeron, but that thing is ancient so maybe technology has advanced enough to blur the lines?
- fragmede 4y agoIf your alternative is an unavailable raspberry pi, a Wyse with a Celeron for $30 is comparable.
- doubled112 4y agoNot only comparable right now, but a great deal in comparison.
- eropple 4y agoThere exists a small army of SBCs not named "Raspberry Pi" worth considering over them for many use cases.
- gandalfff 4y agoHow does the power consumption compare with the RPi?
- bluedino 4y agoDell/HP SFF's are really powerful now. i7, 32GB, 512GB SSD's can be had dirt cheap...
- indigodaddy 4y agoYep I’ve gotten two HP SFFs in the last few years for incredible value/$
- phil21 4y agoThe best part is the integrated UPS and KVM!
- _0w8t 4y agoThe cost does not include the power consumption. For Intel-based Mac Mini running a network filter I suppose it will be at least its idle number 20 Wt or about 200 KWt/year or 20 USD/year (using 10 cent per KWt as an average price in US). Using any kind of VM will bring that to 30 USD/year. This is a non-trivial amount. In Europe that may reach over 60 Euro/year depending on how a particular country is affected by the war. It is unclear if using an old Intel-based MacBook Air without the screen will be significantly better. While its idle power is around 3 Wt, running a network filter in a VM will wake the CPU up often enough to bring the totals closer I suppose to Mac Mini. Raspberry PI 4 on the other hand consumes only 6 Wt at the full load. Using it as a mostly idle network server brings that down below 1 Wt or 1 USD/year. MacBook Air with M1 may be closer to Raspberry PI numbers without using VMs, but those even with a broken screen I suppose are not that cheap. And running a network software in а VM there may again brings numbers to 10 USD/year or more.