I’m going to run generic server tasks (webhosting, Nextcloud, Home Assistant) but also use it as a torrent client, NAS and media center. It will sit close to the dumb TV and give it IPTV and file playback capabilities. I haven’t decided between a SBC or mini PC yet.
My requirements are:
- low idle power consumption (electricity is expensive here, I’m aiming for 5 W with the HDD spun down, able to idle without spinning the fan) so preferrably ARM
- reliability (I’m worried about SD cards in particular, maybe booting from NVMe/mSATA is better)
- connecting my 8TB SATA HDD
- Bluetooth+WiFi+100Mb/s Ethernet
- no dedicated GPU or NPU needed
- 1x FullHD video output (HDMI or even VGA, the TV is ancient)
- GPIO for IR receiver (IPTV should be accessible to tech-illiterate parents)
- budget of 100 € for the whole setup
- available in the Czech Republic (preferring local retailers or used market to Amazon or Aliexpress)
Raspberry Pi 4/5 seems compelling but the HDD needs a separate 12V source and USB adapter, making the setup a little unwieldy, plus people say RPi is overpriced. Mini PCs boot from reliable storage but lack GPIO so they need a USB infraport, and many don’t have SATA or wireless either so that adds more adapters. Or should I repurpose my old laptop, which would run at 10 W and need an adapter for IR but have wireless (and kind of a UPS) built in?
I think that there might be other SBCs (RPi competitors) suited for my use case but I haven’t been able to find a better deal than a used 60 € Raspberry Pi 4B/5 (+10 € fan box + 20 € high-endurance SD card + 2 € microHDMI adapter + I already have the power adapter) from the official site. Given that the 4B and 5 with 4GB RAM cost almost the same, I wonder if the power upgrade is worth it given that the 5’s idle power draw is higher, there is no A/V jack (I can solder though) and I only have the 3A power supply, requiring an extra 20 € to use its full CPU power.
Old laptops make fantastic home servers.
Yeah. speaking of which, i have like 12 old dell i5/i7 8th gen Intel laptioawith network port and 16GB ram and ssd space ranging from 256 to 512gb gen that I should really get rid of. Thinking of charging $50 +shipping for them. Not sure if peeps would be interested.
There are small miniPCs that are designed to sip power. You may want to take a look.
Im not sure you will get 5 W for anything other than a pi but you can try!
Yeah but at that point I can just use the 10 year old laptop I have lying around, since size is not really a priority. I have installed Lubuntu on its HDD and it’s been so-so as an HTPC but I think it will be alright with a new small SATA SSD. It might need a lid + power button hack (using simple electronics wired to the corresponding connectors?) though because the BIOS has no “power on AC” option to get it back up after an outage.
Upgrading that laptop to an SSD is essential and will make it seem like a much newer machine. If space isnt a priority, just use the laptop with an SSD. It’s essentially the same as a mini-PC with a built-in monitor. You won’t have GPIO, but there has to be some sort of USB IR adapter out there.
The Pi5 is overpriced and requires what might as well be a proprietary power connector (5V5A USB is absurd) costing you even more. You’ll have less computing power at a higher cost with this option.
I have an official RPi 5V3A supply already, which can power the Pi 5 at lower clock speeds, which kinda defeats the point of buying it over the 4B, unless they are almost the same price (around 60 € used at the official store). I’ve been trying to contact someone selling a “barely used” 4B for 40 € but they haven’t responded yet.
You can probably just buy the SSD and use the laptop as the htpc/server and then use the savings to buy the used RPi to tinker with separately.
Yeah, that’s where it’s going now, the SSD arrives tomorrow. If the sale does not go through, I’ll keep the money or buy some microcontrollers instead.
Maybe take a look at all the RPi clones out there now. The RPI Foundation has really been shitting the bed for the last several years and doesn’t really make appealing products anymore, nor do they deserve your money.
I switched from the pi4b to a refurbished lenovo tiny m93p i5 with a 500 GB ssd (99 euros) and never looked back. Installed proxmox and now I have a versatile low power homelab.
Not as power efficient as a pi but 17 W at idle is pretty damned good for such a tiny powerhouse.
The €100 budget might be broken but I’m running a Pironman5 with a Pi5 16gb and an SSD and it’s a solid server.
One thing to bear in mind is that SD cards are very bad at constant writes so I’d recommend any heavy write processes write to the SSD drive (databases, file storage etc). I use it for several things including as a build server - running Gitea as a Podman image.
You can probably save some money by using the smaller RAM Pi5s but I have no complaints about mine, and building the case was a fun exercise.
Independent retailer in the Netherlands here: https://www.kiwi-electronics.com/en/search?search=pironman+5
Best of luck with your project.
I think the Aoostar R1 will be the simplest setup for you. The N100/N150 have pretty good idle power usage, and it supports 2 3.5HDDs and NVME.
It’s around 3x the budget, which is a greater dealbreaker than a USB3.0-SATA adapter plus 12V source, all of which I already own.
Also, the R1 name sounds too AI-y to me (Rabbit, DeepSeek) but that’s not really relevant.If your budget is that tight, I would just say just repurpose your laptop, just take the battery out if it’s not already.
The Raspberry fits in the budget, and there is a guy selling one for 40 € but he’s not responded yet…
Also what’s the problem with the battery? It still lasts an hour with the screen on so it’s not trash yet… I’m into electronics and repurpose old Li-Ion cells all the time, including 15 year old Nokia BL-5Cs and they’re alright, they don’t spontaneously develop shorts and are protected against electrical abuse. It’s the alkaline cells that cause havoc (corrosion) if left unused for years. If need be, I can just replace individual cells (I think they are 18650) from a power tool found in trash. Of course, I would get rid of bulging or overheating cells if I encountered them.
Laptops with the screen closed make awesome budget servers!
- built-in battery backup, even if it only buys enough time for safe shutdown
- has onboard video capability (most of the time) for transcoding or for direct-to-TV console use
- usually has plenty of useful IO on it
plenty of useful IO
It’s not that old or professional, unfortunately. It was a budget 15.6" one I got from a relative. Only two USB ports (one is 3.0), Ethernet, HDMI, headphone jack and DVD±RW drive. It’s underwhelming but not that I need much more. It can’t even do 4K but the TV is 1366x768 so that’s OK too.
Sounds like you know what your doing. You do you chief I guess
Too bad so few PC GPUs support HDMI CEC: you wouldn’t need a dedicated IR port on the machine, and your parents wouldn’t have to figure out a new remote.
I don’t think the TV does either
Edit: it does! I tested with the existing satellite STB (which I’ll be replacing with IPTV for cost reasons) but the only feature it can do is turn the source on/off, it does not pass the 0-9 or P+/P- key presses to it when in HDMI mode - it switches to the now useless analog tuner when any of them are pressed. Either way, I have a universal remote that I can program to send different codes for 0-9 and P+/P-, so that they are only interpreted by the USB IR receiver I install and not the TV.
- don’t need GPIO or IR; there’s a buncha android bluetooth remotes around that you can repurpose via input-remapper
- don’t need SATA for 3.5 drives, there are USB-to-SATA adapters in the sub$20 range
so that allows you to go for a board from a discarded laptop. you need skylake or newer for purposes of video decoding and power efficiency and a board that can run without battery and display (e.g., most thinkpads can, some consumer models can’t).
a search in my local marketplace nets 20+ of those in the sub$40 range (busted screens, keyboards, etc.), you get all the connectivity, way more storage options than rpi, included power brick, and you don’t hafta dick around with arm packages.
I already have two USB adapters for SATA, they just require Molex connectors so I need an entire ATX PSU right now to power the drive. They will be enough to get the setup going before I measure how much power I actually need and solder an appropriate 12V and 5V supply to the cable.
I have an old laptop that is used as an HTPC but not much anymore. It runs Lubuntu alright but it needs an upgrade to an SSD. I think I’ll shell out a little extra for 512 GB rather than some 64-128 GB the Linux+software install needs, so I can cache media there and reduce the HDD utilization. A hack will be required to bypass the lack of “power on AC” in the BIOS, probably removing the lid magnets and wiring the power switch to an Arduino or something to facilitate a restart after a power outage (long unplanned outages are rare though so I might get away without that right now). The idle power usage will be some 10 W but I can live with that.
I wonder if there is an advanced BitTorrent client that can import my extensive qBittorrent library and respond to supply/demand while minimizing the HDD’s duty cycle… for example refusing to spin it up just to seed public or overseeded torrents, and only spinning it up to copy the contents to SSD for files that are on demand, or write completed downloads from SSD to HDD.
I second the miniPC suggestions, I have a Dell Optiplex 9020M (bought used for about €70 some two years ago), put an SSD in it plus 8 GB RAM, and it handles anything I throw at it (minus real-time video transcoding).
I use it in a headless way, so YMMV with the video displaying part, but I doubt a Pi would be stronger in this regard.
In any case, I think it’s worth looking around before committing to a Pi, these micro pcs are quite convenient to carry/store/service, and they are self-contained unlike a Pi.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Here’s the article that started me down this path ^
Edit: I see you’re more into electronics, and I don’t know much about GPIO on these machines, so the laptop may be the simplest solution then - in any case, it’s nice to have options
You want a multi-function server with some rather bloaty software, so an rpi is probably the simplest approach even if you can save a small fraction of the idle power with another board. If your SATA drive needs 12V then it needs 12V and the cpu won’t matter. Maybe you can use a 2.5" SATA drive that runs on just 5V.
Why is the idle power so important for a home setup? Can you deploy a solar panel? They are stupidly cheap now.
- The drive can be spun down, and I’ll try to cache most frequent and recent files to SSD to save power
- Volts aren’t watts, the HDD uses 20W when spinning but <1 W in standby
- The home already overproduces solar so yes, we have cheap electricity at daytime, but we still have to pay some 0.40 €/kWh for the nightly use. Solar panels are a good investment but so is saving power regardless of production, otherwise one is robbing oneself of the grid buyback payouts. These are around half the cost of nighttime electricity.
If you’re overproducing solar, then you might want to add some batteries to save up energy to use at night.
I have the impression that spinning hdd’s up and down is bad for their reliability and tbh I don’t feel like I need a HDD on a home server these days. I have around 5TB in a Hetzner storage box and I figure I’d rather let them take care of the hardware for me. The data is all encrypted so the privacy is ok.
I think some of the modern mini-PCs with Intel N95 or N100 cpus can do that level of power draw. Alternative, use a mobile phone compatibel with and installed with Ubuntu Touch or postmarketOS, so you can run a linux file server on the phone. USB might be a bit of a faff, but usb-C will prevail I think.
USB-C definitely can handle a 768p monitor plus playing video from disk and 100Mbit Ethernet, it’s just that most phones under my 100 € budget (cut short by the dongle) don’t even have 2.0 OTG capabilities because they’re basic ones for seniors. The only hope to get a discount on the good ones are those with a semi-busted screen but I’m not relying on that to install Linux.
Yeah, as long as you get a phone that supports usb-c 3.0 or higher, you can get one of those powered hubs that charges your phone and has a gigabit Ethernet port.
Not for the budget. I have some spare phones but no USB-C ones and there is no way this all works over microUSB, even with MHL.
I used to run my nas from a raspberry pi with an USB to Sata bridge, but I found that USB cables are as always super unreliable and keep disconnecting and eventually I get filesystem errors, had to format and restore from backup.
I ended up repurposing an old i3 computer as nas. Which worked well for few years until I was scrubbing the harddrives this summer and one of the harddrives died, when I took it off it was super hot. So I learned that having front fans blowing air directly to the hardrives is important so they don’t overheat. I’m not sure if external cases have enough air circulation.
So maybe you could consider the overall reliability of the system and temperature of the harddrive, electricity can be expensive but an 8TB harddrive surely is more. Also you say you want no fan, so that makes things harder, maybe you can use the raspberry pi just as a client and have a big noisy NAS made from some old computer somewhere else in the house? And maybe have it so it wakes up on LAN when it’s being used and powered down when it’s not to safe power?
I’m OK with a fan running when the HDD is spinning. To save power, a SSD can perhaps be used as a cache to minimize HDD usage time during file transfers over LAN or torrent.
Maybe you can use the raspberry pi gpio to control the fan and get drive temperature via smart to control the fan speed.
Most MoBos allow programmatic fan control too, right?
I don’t know, never tried anything like that, I just plug the fans to the 12v voltage rail and leave them full power all the time.
The Fujitsu Futro S740 are quite nifty little devices which can be found for around 50-60€ on the used market. They use <5W at idle and have more compute power than a raspberry pi 5.
A nice writeup about these can be found here
Fujitsu Futro S740
Now that’s a good recommendation. I didn’t find any for sale around here but I can get an HP T530 that also idles below 10 W for 35 €. I’d need to buy an HDMI-DP adapter, plus an M.2 SSD or a wireless module (they use the same slot and there’s just one), the other would need to be a USB peripheral.
Might be worth looking into ODroid H4+ (or any other really) especially into non-arm architecture (personally had more issues than I would’ve wanted).
All the use cases I need are well-documented on ARM by the RPi community. What issues do you think I’d encounter?
Docker runs abbhorently, instability and having to restart every week or so (tried Raspbian, Arch, Alpine, and all went unstable in a couple of days, even tried changing the SD and power supply).
Back on the day, sure, ARM was the thing you wanted if you went for maximum power saving, but I think there are comparable options that give more bank for your buck in the x86 space, especially if you want to repurpose it later.
In the end, go for whatever you want, you can always sell it later if you don’t like it. I’d just personally wouldn’t go for ARM anymore.
If I was buying a Pi, I’d go second hand.
Why Docker? I’m definitely not after scalability.
Hmmm if you’re running that many different services I would recommend going x86 and installing proxmox. N100 systems are very power efficient, though it might work out a little more expensive than a raspberry pi
Many? They’re going to be idle most of the time, I don’t think I’ll even need a Pi 5 over a 4B
They still hold use up RAM even when the service is idle. I started with PIs for my home server. RAM usage was the reason I wound up switching to x86
You mean x86 is more memory efficient? I guess I’ll try the 10yo laptop first, it’s the cheapest option for the time being. It has 4 GB of memory too but I really don’t think a single browser tab playing 720p video (the TV is 1366x768), a torrent client, Home Assistant and a file server will even max it out. I can reserve swap on its new SATA SSD just in case. It’s a decent HTPC already (save for boot times and the clumsy power button, which I can solder a remote switch to) and that’s on an HDD!
Not OP, but I have something to share you migh be interested in.
A few weeks ago I ran qbittorrent on a RPi 3B+ (yes this one is way older than 4 or 5) and It chocked really hard on the ram and USB connected HDD… It even made piHole unresponsive and broke the DNS requests when checking file integrity…
Barebone installation on ext4 FS (without docker) did made it a bit better but was still very slow and wasn’t able to handle 100 consecutive torrents…
As a conclusion, if you’re going to run a few services concurrently on a pi with qbittorrent you’re rapidly going be limited and bottlenecked by the limits of your pi ! Don’t get me wrong those are nice little devices and use my RPi 3b+ as dns resolver for my whole lan with pihole. But I won’t bet on those for more heavy load and multiple services concurrently.
As a side note, I use an 10 year old gaming laptop as server which doesn’t give a sweat with over 20 services (Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, sftpgo, navidrome, baikal,qbittorrent…)
Yes, you’re allowed
Congratulations, you are very funny. /s
I was actually considering something like “A new Raspberry Pi 5 is the best and most cost-effective option for my use case” to take advantage of Cunningham’s law.
Thanks, but no need to thank me, making you smile is payment enough :)
