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It's wild that a Pi now uses more power than a box with a U/T sku Intel CPU! Combined with the high prices it has pushed me completely away from the Pi.

• wtallis 3y ago
  The PCIe switch, SATA controller and USB3 controller all add a fair bit of power compared to having those functions integrated into an SoC built on a better process. But that also means it's not entirely fair to say the Pi is using more power; it's the system as a whole using more power because of all the extra parts needed to overcome the Pi's limitations.
  • Saris 3y ago
    Sure, but an x86 box has all of those built in already.
    • wtallis 3y ago
      Yes, that was my point. An x86 box has lots of built-in (and power-efficient) IO capabilities that are not part of the Raspberry Pi. When adding a bunch of IO-expanding peripherals to a Pi-based system, you should properly attribute the power consumption instead of making it sound like the Pi itself has a serious idle power problem.
      • theodric 3y ago
        That power footprint also includes the 6 SSDs. Are there mini PCs with 8 SATA ports that fit in a 13-17W power envelope including 6 disks?
        • Saris 3y ago
          SSDs idle at like 0.2W IIRC, so 6 of those shouldn't have much impact on overall power. Not sure on 8 SATA ports as most only have 3-4, but I'd be using NVMe SSDs if I could these days anyways, main boot drive in the motherboard and some more on a PCIe addon adapter.
          • theodric 3y ago
            8TB NVMe SSDs are rather expensive, and I'm running 3x 8TB SSDs in addition to 2x 2TB and a 512GB boot volume. Cost was not a major constraint on this build, but paying 1199.- vs 399.- for an 8TB SSD felt a bit comical. I also can't make any use of NVMe performance benefits when a SATA SSD can more than fill a 1Gb Ethernet pipe, or even a 2.5Gb or 5Gb pipe. Only a 10GbE system would benefit from being able to push more than 550MB/sec, and even that could be met by multiple SATA SSDs in parallel.