Hi folks. Currently thinking of buying a new SBC since my Odroid HC4 died i am looking to buy a new sbc as my home Server. I would be mainly running portainer with the following apps:
- pihole
- wallabag
- conduit
- revolt ( optional)
- grocy (optional have to try first )
- wireguard
The orange pi 5 with 8gb RAM seemed like a good choice, but the 4 or even 3B models are even a bit cheaper. What do you guys think. Should I go for a prior gen or even a different SBC entirely?
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There’s no such thing as overkill, only extra overhead to do more things with. Hell, if you found yourself with a ton of excess resources and good cooling, you could run a distributed computing project like BOINC on some of the spare cores and help out some scientists.
You wouldn’t see much of a bump in CPU performance, 6cores to 8 cores with a 200mhz clock speed improvement isn’t ground breaking.
Going to 8gb of memory will give caching benefits.
But… That’s all well and good. However. What I found the most beneficial on a OPi 5, and the entire reason I bought it over other boards, is the onboard NVME m.2 slot. Yes, the orange pi 5 can support 2230 and 2242 M.2 NVME drives at PCIe3.0x1 speeds, and it makes a WORLD of difference in performance. Like you would not even believe how fast compiling and installing software becomes when it’s not bottlenecked by the ~500 iops an SD card can struggle through. SD cards are ungodly slow, and OS level writes tend to kill them every few months (they’re not designed to handle that kind of work). Even the cheapest aliexpress M.2 drives, which I bought a 512gb KingSpec one for like $16, blow SD cards out of the water, and will last for YEARS with a typical pi’s workload compared to the few-months of an SD card. Plus they’re big enough to even do a bit of file hosting on.
Have you considered buying a used thin client / mini PC?
Since the Orange Pi 5 sounded interesting, I checked it out and it’s rather expensive. Well at least for me.
I found it from 180 to 200 Euro for the 8GB version. An used thin client or mini PC can be bought for half the price and most of the time it comes with 256gb storage included.
The extra cost for energy should be less than what you might be paying extra for the Orange Pi plus storage.
This, was about to do this myself. ~$60-80 for a lenovo m720q on eBay with 256gb SSD, 8gb ram, 8th gen Intel i3 8100t or if you are lucky i5-8400t. Why would get anything else?
The ARM cpu will still beat out an i3/i5 in idle and load power consumption, and the mini PC also does not have GPIO for people who care about that kind of stuff.
Yup, I agree. But those aren’t any of OP’s requirements so not sure where you are going with this?
Also, ~5watt difference again not sure where you are going with this. x86 supports more OS and ram can also be increased if needed. In OP’s requirements the winner is clear.
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Are you definitely tied to the form factor? Because for $20 more you can get a much more capable mini PC.
This is the way.
Don’t buy for the MINIMUM of what you need now. Give yourself some room to grow.
That thing looks sketchy as hell, title stats and picture stats don’t even match.
I am using this machine right now if you have any questions I can answer for you.
On the graphic it said wifi 5 and the title said wifi 6 and the wifi and Bluetooth icons were swapped for the versions making it look sketchy, but I realized now it says wifi 5/2.4 referring to the frequency.
Out of curiosity what OS or pseudo OS are you running off of it?
I’m running Fedora CoreOS.
Right idea, but I’d suggest getting dell or lenovo mini pcs instead. Saves you a bit of cash and you can get a semi-recent (low tdp) i5 + 8gb ram + whatever ssd the seller will throw you. They run 80ish USD before tax iirc
This option didn’t work for me because I needed Alder Lake Quick Sync support.
For Pihole or any other firewall applications two ethernet ports are nice and not many SBCs have that.
For Conduit or any other Matrix server, fast storage connection, ideally a NVMe drive is also very useful and again not many SBCs have that.
Are two ports really necessary for PiHole? I guess if you have EVERY device in your house pointed at it and you have a LOT of devices, maybe…
Not in the slightest. Even with a couple hundred devices pointed at it you’re not going to exhaust a 1Gb port. It’s just answering DNS queries, it’s not a firewall in and of itself.
I’m currently running a PiHole, haven’t found a use for a potential 2nd Ethernet port. It’s not a router or firewall, both of which have value for two Ethernet ports.
To be fair, the PiHole is just doing a firewall function: DNS filtering. If you have a fully featured router/firewall like PFsense, you can do everything a PiHole does using that. So I see how one could argue that a PiHole might benefit from dual NICs, but in practice, for home users, I agree that it’s not necessary.
No, not strictly necessary.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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