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Glad I am not alone in this. Old laptops are much better than Raspberry pies and often free and power efficient.
by anotherpaul 1y ago
Glad I am not alone in this. Old laptops are much better than Raspberry pies and often free and power efficient.
- Onavo 1y ago> free and power efficient Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.
- kassner 1y agoMy laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.
- motorest 1y ago> My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load. Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.
- kassner 1y ago> tad over 6W That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I used to self host on the RPi, but it was just not enough[1]. Laptops/mini-PCs will have a much better burstable-to-idle power ratio (6/3W vs 35/8W). 1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-backup-strategy/ https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-ba...
- motorest 1y ago> That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I don't have a dog in this race, but I recall that RPi's throttling issues when subjected to high loads were actually thermal throttling. Meaning, you picked up a naked board and started blasting benchmarks until it overheated. You cannot make sweeping statements about RPi's throttling while leaving out the root cause.
- kassner 1y agoamd64 processors will have lots of hardware acceleration built in. I couldn’t get past 20MB/s over SSH on the Pi4, vs 80MB/s on my i3. So while they can show similar geekbench results, the experience of using the Pi is a bit more frustrating than on paper.
- dd_xplore 1y agoRPi is amazing for IOT tasks cuz it’s pretty portable but not for running general purpose server tasks, you’d get better performance per watt with used gear
- HPsquared 1y agoSay power costs 25¢/kWh. That's $2 per year per watt of standby power. Adjust to your local prices. So that'd take 30 years to pay back. Or, with discounted cash flow applied... Probably never.
- imrejonk 1y agoAnd: they have a crash cart (keyboard, mouse and display) and battery backup built-in. An old laptop is perfect for starting a homelab. The only major downside I can think of, and as another commenter already mentioned, is the limited storage (RAID) options.