No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don’t have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.
No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don’t have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
Why would I even go for a RasPi or equivalent?
I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.
To me, the RasPi served two purposes:
I would add:
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t host something I consider as an essential service on something that isn’t constantly powered.
Guess our use cases are way too different to properly compare. 😊