Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
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Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#2Unless you specifically need the 8GB RAM (where Rpi 4 is the only contender in this range as of right now AFAIK), IMO for server use-cases it'd be better to consider either Odroid C4 or Rock Pi 4 - both offer better storage interfaces than USB/microSD natively. Also easier to run vanilla Debian/Ubuntu (or Armbian, which is very close to vanilla but can be easily built custom for either board preconfigured with necessary kernel modules/dtbs/boot loader/drivers/firmware for each board).
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#3I don't understand why you would bother with this when you can pick up a second-hand Thinkpad for so cheap which brings a builtin UPS and far more performance, RAM, and IO options.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#4An ARM based server almost sounds like an oxymoron.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#5I don't understand why you would bother with this when you can pick up a second-hand Thinkpad for so cheap which brings a builtin UPS and far more performance, RAM, and IO options.
What about power(electricity) consumption?
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#6Don’t do it! For (your own) source code or valuables, you need ECC memory and a capacitor on the power supply for your storage device which, by the way, should not be prone to corruption when the device is vibrated a little too hard causing electrical shorts in the SD-card or USB connectors! Backups aren’t the answer either, in fact backups can trigger RAM errors (especially with encryption and compression enabled) that may only ever be occurring during backups leading to..silently corrupted backups.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#7I don't understand why you would bother with this when you can pick up a second-hand Thinkpad for so cheap which brings a builtin UPS and far more performance, RAM, and IO options.
Architecture, form factor, access to pins, scale, power.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#8I don't understand why you would bother with this when you can pick up a second-hand Thinkpad for so cheap which brings a builtin UPS and far more performance, RAM, and IO options.
As someone who's grown tired of a flaky rpi connected to an external drive, is there a generation to shoot for in terms of low price to reasonable performance?
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#9A lot of skepticism in this thread. I've got a pi4 4GB running Ubuntu server, acting as a SMB file server, Plex media server, Mopidy music server, Spotify Connect endpoint, video recorder for my two outdoor IP cameras, and a Minecraft server for my kids, all running simultaneously. And it's not breaking a sweat, not even getting close to full memory or CPU utilization.
I do use a USB nvme SSD enclosure for storage to be fair, and it's only stable when using a powered USB hub.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#10An ARM based server almost sounds like an oxymoron.
Why so? Even cloud giants are moving in that direction[1].
When next generation Mac Mini with Apple Silicon comes out, data centers using that would be running Apple Server packages on that.
In fact I've been running my production applications on ARM servers for ~a year and it has resulted in greater capital efficiency.
I've been using Pi 2 with USB storage as a publicly hosted git server for over 5 years used by multiple users.