If you don't care about the internal SSD drive than the Argon One case would be a nice alternative to this. It is a nice looking case which also moves all the ports to one side. While not the cheapest case it is likely less expensive than getting all the parts together for this design.
Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
71–80 of 135 posts
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#72Unless 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 necess…
There are official Ubuntu server releases available for the RPi2-4. Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions are available.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had encrypted USB storage on a Pi 2, as a Git server for over 5 years, used by several users for large projects, when the commit size was large there were some CPU bottleneck(it's Pi2 after all), but never had any reliability issues although I had daily backup to another USB storage on the same device and a remote-backup pushed from the device. I might have rebooted it 3-4 times over past 5 years just for cleani…
What Toshiba SD cards do you use? I bought 256GB ones and they all had too much latency to be usable.
I've bought Toshiba cards from 16GB to 128GB over past several years and I agree that their latency is low when compared to Samsung or other brands; But Toshiba cards has never failed but every other brand has(corrupted/becoming write protected etc.) especially on RPi.
But since almost every SBC support booting from SSD (Even if they don't, we can have /boot on SD and /root on SSD), so low SD card latency is not an issue to me. In fact I'm digging up old 4GB cards for /boot to repurpose larger capacity SD cards from SBCs for other purposes(Chromebook, Camera etc.).
As for specific model, there were many different model names, I usually choose the middle tier for performance:price.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#74A 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…
What cameras and monitoring software do you use?
I’ve been trying to put together a self-hosted surveillance situation to replace this Nest. So far I’ve got a super cheap PoE camera from amazon and Zoneminder. The camera leaves a lot to be desired... and I’m still figuring out Zoneminder
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#75A 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…
What cameras and monitoring software do you use? I’ve been trying to put together a self-hosted surveillance situation to replace this Nest. So far I’ve got a super cheap PoE camera from amazon and Zoneminder. The camera leaves a lot to be desired... and I’m still figuring out Zoneminder
I use motionEye to monitor RTSP feed from two IP cameras (Generic) on RPi 3(SSD, btrfs, zswap, ArchLinux ARM - headless, passive cooling - heat sink case) the feed averages around 30fps(720p) with motion detection. I had a third logitech c720 via USB but removed it to get better frame rates for the former and make room(CPU) for a SDR setup(To receive 433Mhz from other sensors).
Note: Generic IP cameras dial home for public identification on their apps and also would never receive security updates. I had to meticulously block all open ports using firewall. If you feel that's too much of risk, then I would suggest building a camera setup with RPi camera or ESP camera yourself to be used with motionEye.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
What cameras and monitoring software do you use? I’ve been trying to put together a self-hosted surveillance situation to replace this Nest. So far I’ve got a super cheap PoE camera from amazon and Zoneminder. The camera leaves a lot to be desired... and I’m still figuring out Zoneminder
I use motionEye to monitor RTSP feed from two IP cameras (Generic) on RPi 3(SSD, btrfs, zswap, ArchLinux ARM - headless, passive cooling - heat sink case) the feed averages around 30fps(720p) with motion detection. I had a third logitech c720 via USB but removed it to get better frame rates for the former and make room(CPU) for a SDR setup(To receive 433Mhz from other sensors). Note: Generic IP cameras dial home for…
Thanks for the details! yea i picked up a generic chinese camera and did not at all like the required login to their servers... I’m not confident enough in my sysadmin skills to make sure this thing isn’t spying on me.
I’m considering spending 4x-5x the amount on better hardware..
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#77Unless 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 necess…
> better storage interfaces than USB/microSD natively.
For this micro-server form factor, with a tiny little board in a tiny little case, what is a better storage form factor than a little portable SSD connected via USB 3?
(I wouldn't be wild about using a microSD card for a server that relied much on storage)
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#78An ARM based server almost sounds like an oxymoron.
Heh, the fastest HPC cluster on the top 500 list is arm. Amusingly #2, #3, and #4 aren't x86-64 either. Number 5 is, but mainly because the xeons are handling I/O for the real heavy lifting on the matrix-2000 accelerators. The first pure x86-64 cluster is #8. So the performance story is changing quickly, and arm is just getting started.
Japan Captures TOP500 Crown with Arm-Powered Supercomputer
https://top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-powe... (June 2020)
> The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x.
> Fugaku is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops).
> The new system is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#79I am waiting for AMD based "NUC", because I don't want to give money to Intel. The reason I want a AMD based computer is to run vanilla Debian on it. Vanilla debian does not run on Raspberry unfortunately. Currently I'm running Odroid XU4, but I need more ram and horsepower.
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, because larger and more expensive than most systems in this context, but it comes with anything one needs, with the exception of CPU, RAM and storage. https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20A300%20Series/
Yes, love mine. Fits two NVMe drives plus two 2.5” drives in its tiny frame.
Re: Turning the Raspberry Pi 4 into a Mini Server
#80A 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…
The Minecraft server part sounds really impressive to me. Are you running PaperMC? I remember last when I tried on my RPI 3b it was way too slow.
I have been running a Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi 4 for my friends and I for a while so I may be able to provide some input. PaperMC is the only way I could get the Pi to run Minecraft while having an acceptable player experience.
I have to keep the world files on an external SSD though as the SD card is simply to slow and becomes a bottle neck. I also had to change some of Minecrafts settings as well to reduce CPU strain (disable spawn chunks, reduce render distance, etc). I also overclocked the Pi's CPU to 2 Gigahertz. It actually works out really nicely and I recommend you give it a try if you are interested. You are going to want to use a 64bit os like Ubuntu though in order to avoid a 32bit OS' max memory process allocation limit of 2 gigs, Minecraft is very ram hungry.