5 ms·

I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of

I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you. On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that. I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything". With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.

mmastrac 3y ago
The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  > The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
  - mmastrac 3y ago
    You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
    - kkielhofner 3y ago
      The comparison to other ARM SBCs is kind of a non-starter to me considering what the software support and ecosystem/community looks like. I have an entire graveyard of ARM SBC Raspberry Pi alternatives and I've given up on that approach due to the horrendous software support and fringe ecosystem. However, I'm primarily talking about x86_64 here and is has the broadest software support and biggest community of all.
leidenfrost 3y ago
I'm looking for a noiseless low power NAS solution. Any recommendations? After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Get a NUC or mini-ITX system and a fanless case[1][2]? [1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.... [2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&type=FANLESS%20CASES&type_sub=Mini-ITX&model=A-ITX48-M1B https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...
  - derefr 3y ago
    Where do the drives live? Drives, as in at least two, but more likely 5, if you're taking fault-tolerance seriously.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      Since you want silent it'll be SSD's. One internally, you can get external USB housings for the others. Shouldn't be too shabby if using USB 3.1 or better. If you want HDDs then a fan is a non-issue, the HDDs will drown out the fans.
- pmontra 3y ago
  An Odroid HC4 https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
Majromax 3y ago
> I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. I don't think this is a fair comparison. In principle, anyone could follow the hacky instructions for the Pi and complete the same project. In some cases (such as the PiHole), it might even be worthwhile. If your instructions begin with "find a used thin client on eBay," however, then there's no guarantee that the subsequent instructions are useful. My thin terminal might not be the same as the author's, and the author certainly can't specify a single particular brand/model because the eBay stock is limited and changeable. "Mainstreaming" a hobby project needs the standardization at least as much as it needs the performance, and the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem remains an advantage. Ironically, this advantage is the same reason that the company prioritized business deliveries during the shortage, since business use depends even more critically on the stable, supported platform.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  We're in agreement. From my original post, one sentence after your quote: > For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.

mmastrac 3y ago

The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.

kkielhofner 3y ago
> The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    The comparison to other ARM SBCs is kind of a non-starter to me considering what the software support and ecosystem/community looks like. I have an entire graveyard of ARM SBC Raspberry Pi alternatives and I've given up on that approach due to the horrendous software support and fringe ecosystem. However, I'm primarily talking about x86_64 here and is has the broadest software support and biggest community of all.

leidenfrost 3y ago

I'm looking for a noiseless low power NAS solution. Any recommendations? After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.

magicalhippo 3y ago
Get a NUC or mini-ITX system and a fanless case[1][2]? [1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.... [2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&type=FANLESS%20CASES&type_sub=Mini-ITX&model=A-ITX48-M1B https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...
- derefr 3y ago
  Where do the drives live? Drives, as in at least two, but more likely 5, if you're taking fault-tolerance seriously.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Since you want silent it'll be SSD's. One internally, you can get external USB housings for the others. Shouldn't be too shabby if using USB 3.1 or better. If you want HDDs then a fan is a non-issue, the HDDs will drown out the fans.
pmontra 3y ago
An Odroid HC4 https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

Majromax 3y ago

> I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. I don't think this is a fair comparison. In principle, anyone could follow the hacky instructions for the Pi and complete the same project. In some cases (such as the PiHole), it might even be worthwhile. If your instructions begin with "find a used thin client on eBay," however, then there's no guarantee that the subsequent instructions are useful. My thin terminal might not be the same as the author's, and the author certainly can't specify a single particular brand/model because the eBay stock is limited and changeable. "Mainstreaming" a hobby project needs the standardization at least as much as it needs the performance, and the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem remains an advantage. Ironically, this advantage is the same reason that the company prioritized business deliveries during the shortage, since business use depends even more critically on the stable, supported platform.

kkielhofner 3y ago
We're in agreement. From my original post, one sentence after your quote: > For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.