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.
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…)