In my self hosting journey, which is very much in its infancy mind you, many times I’ve longed for an extra machine I can use to try following tutorials on setting up samba shares, home assistant, what have you without having to worry about messing up my main machine and having to clean up after myself. As for acquiring such hardware on the cheap, I keep reading how the laptopocalypse w/ Windows 10 end of life will flood the markets w/ literally unlimited free e-waste bro!!! But my own experience hunting these EOL once in a lifetime deals has been more frownie face than happy face. Lots of $100+ listings and, idk that just seems like a lot to ask for something like that.
So just for fun I searched eBay for “raspberry pi” and came across this listing for a raspberry pi 3 w/ 1 GB RAM for $25. 1 GB of RAM seems like not very much, but then again I’m not trying to break the sound barrier here, I just want something that can sit on my desk basically unnoticed and hook it up to my KVM switch so I can switch to it from time to time, like whenever I want to try following a tutorial and not losing any sleep if I fail (and I fail often).
I’ve also kinda always had a little bit of envy from not being in the raspberry pi club, so this is my shot at getting into the club. I think I’m going to spring for this one, so my question for the audience is, but like honestly am I about to piss $25 down the drain? Would this be good enough for my purposes or is the 1 GB of RAM going to bottleneck me like a boss?
Sorry for the run on sentences, my brain’s tired today.
@Eldritch @poVoq
The architecture may also be problem, when you want to use Containers (Docker, Podman). Some images are not available for all architectures.
The 3B has a 64bit ArmV8 CPU, there is a better support.
I have some Odroid devices with 32bit ArmV7 CPU, where often images are not available for.
https://wiki.geekworm.com/Raspberry/_Pi/_3/_Model/_B
Wow, armv7 is definitely back there in terms of support. One of the more known v7 devices was the nexus 7, released in 2012.
Definitely, though that can also be an issue with older x86 cores. Or, hell newer ones with non heterogeneous cores. Though that at least is getting better on both architectures.