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.

  • filtoid@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 days ago

    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.