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Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

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Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#191

Post by pritambaral »

zeroping wrote: post #71
jMyles wrote: post #40

A giant difference between the two, which goes unmentioned here, is that the FX160 runs on AC power at 120 volts. If you have a deployment scenario where you already have 5 volts DC but not 120 volts AC, the pi obviously makes way more sense.

The inverse is also true - the FX160 runs off of 120/240V directly, which is rather convenient if you don't want to use a 5V DC power brick that's larger than the Pi itself. Makes for a rather clean installation if you're shoving it somewhere strange (which seems likely).

5V DC power adapters aren't usually larger than the Raspberry Pi.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#193

Post by oblib »

eriknstr wrote: post #135
oblib wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I purchased one of these and installed CouchDB, Apache web server, and some webs I've made and it will serve those apps just fine to a small office full of desktops connected to a LAN. I've made web apps for managing Contacts, Quotes, Invoices, Expenses, Income Reports, ToDo, Chat, and others. I can back up all my data to a remote server (IBM Cloudant for example), and to another Pi in-house as well. And I've configu…

>I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot. Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea the pi 3 could do that. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and a 3 B at home. I host my website using the 2 B with cloudflare in front of it [1], as well as use it as a login server, but every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted. The last time that happened was a couple of weeks ago and…

The only downsides to this setup is it take longer to boot and apps take longer to start. Since I never shut it off booting isn't an issue and from what I've noticed it's only the first time you load an app that is slow. If you quit and restart them they load pretty fast.

This is the forum post I followed to setup the Pi to boot from the HD, I think it may be newer than the one you found:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Worked like a charm.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#194

Post by narrowtux »

nerdwaller wrote: post #14

If you're in a bigger company, the IT department may have some smaller PCs like this to get rid of. Mine gave a bunch out, I have a Dell optiplex - but instead of the thin client it's a small i3, with a 320gb hdd and 6gb ram. It's dead silent and runs all the home server things like a champ, oh - and it was free. But I'd still own a number of raspberry pis since they're great for hacking or just to support a cool mis…

Did the same thing, used an old Dell Optiplex Mini tower, put some WD Reds inside -> Now I have a nice NAS with Plex.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#195

Post by DamonHD »

inetknght wrote: post #182
DamonHD wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Dell would claim that their brand is the more valuable for their purposes.

I think parent comment was discussing the names rather than the hardware. When I think "Raspberry Pi" I think "Oh yeah there's not very many of those, and they're super cheap and low power and useful" When I think "Dell", I think "Conglomerate"; when I think "Optiplex", I think "stupid-expensive desktop machines"; when I think "FX160" I think "oh great a !@#$ing model number to look up specs for". Yeah, it's 'cheap'…

Horses for courses.

I think that they are both good brands, aimed squarely at the comfort zones of their target market segments.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#196

Post by DamonHD »

teekert wrote: post #189
kutkloon7 wrote: post #171

The raspberry pi's selling points are: 1. It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card. 2. It is tiny 3. It is quite power efficient 4. It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware. 5. It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software) 6. It is cheap All of this makes it fant…

Exactly, all the same hardware makes it possible to exchange images, bit for bit SD-card copies, that run on any of the same model RPis, this is incredibly powerful and handy. For example, installing ROS (Robot Operating System) on Linux can be a PITA, but there is a ready made ROS on Ubuntu Mate for RPi3, so you have it fully functional in minutes.

Well, I was able to recover from damaging my RPi B+ by simply slotting its microSD card into a brand new RPi2 and everything ran, which is completely astonishing as they are not identical.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#197

Post by omnimus »

dingo_bat wrote: post #100
bbayer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can power 2.5 inches usb HDD with no issues. All you have to do is get an official power adaptor and set max_usb_current to true.

Gotta try this.

I havent even set the option and rpi2 started to work with one usb drive when i plugged it in the original adapter.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#198

Post by dingo_bat »

omnimus wrote: post #197
dingo_bat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta try this.

I havent even set the option and rpi2 started to work with one usb drive when i plugged it in the original adapter.

Maybe rpi2 is better for this. I have the old one.

Re: Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi

#200

Post by theamk »

I feel that raspberry pi has another advantage -- it teaches people that not all computing is x86. x86 is always almost associated with proprietary close-source code -- both in BIOS, in SMM and various motherboard peripherals. I personally would be very happy to use simpler devices, but if you want high performance and cheap, then x86 is your only choice.

Using non-x86 devices like Raspberry Pi is the first step in breaking this. Yes, Pi itself has closed-source components, but once the people understand that it is feasible and not hard to run generic server code on ARM/RISC CPUs, the demand will appear, and the market would act and bring cheaper and faster servers to the market. And this is already happening -- for example I think odroids got popular only after Pi has created the demand.

So if you have a choice between x86 and non-x86, chose the latter if you can, to make the world a bit more secure and open.

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