Hi I am currently struggling with deciding between Pis (all variants e.g. Orange Pi) and Nucs as I can’t find any for a reasonable price. Do you guys have any recommandation for me? German/European Stores maybe? I am looking for the best efficency to performance ratio for a low price. Basically just small computing units that I can cluster ideally in a 1U Rackmount.
I decided to go with Tiny/Mini/Micros personally. It consumes more than a Pi but it’s also more powerful. I can find second-hand TMMs locally with 8th gen Intel i5 for almost the same price as a Pi kit (Some Single Board Computers looks affordable, but you often need to add storage, a power brick, an enclosure, which can add up quickly!)
I use TMMs with a mix of 6th-gen and 8th-gen Intel i5. The 6th gen are decent for my needs, but the >7th-gen’s iGPU supports more codecs, which is useful if you want to stream HEVC. i5-8500T also have 2 more cores than i5-6500T!
Edit: those TMMs are used in a lot of businesses and often replaced every 3-4 years. They may be slightly more power hundry than newer hardware, but I like to think I am saving them from being e-waste!
Many of the business TMMs often use hardware that is easily supported across a variety of OSes common in homelabs as well, plus some have features like vPro that can provide OOB access similar (though not as full-featured) to IPMI
Another vote for TMM. Pi type devices will use less power at idle but probably by only around 5w. I have a Pi 4 that idles at 4-5w and HP Elitedesk g5 with i5 8500t that sits at around 9w. The performance difference between the two is night and day. Used Intel 8th gen really is getting to be the sweet spot with regard to price, performance, and efficiency.
I’m adding yet another vote for the little 1 litre x86 thin clients. I run the HP 800 Minis but lots of people also enjoy the tiny ThinkCentres. My use case is very similar to yours - JellyFin for home media plus a few other services. I run them in VM’s under Proxmox. For transcoding, you can pass the Intel Quicksync into the VM (works without it, but is quicker to start up with it and doesn’t peg the CPU).
These little ex-business PC’s are really nicely made - upgrading anything the HP’s is a delight. There’s great technical manuals and they look good enough (and are quite enough) to have in your lounge or bedroom. Businesses tend to replace them at the three or four year mark so there’s always plenty around. I also find them more convenient than a Pi - proper hard drive bay, SODIMM memory etc.
What do you mean Tiny/Miny/Micros?
They are Ultra Small Form Factors PCs from the big brands. Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny, HP EliteDesk/ProDesk Mini and Dell Optiplex Micro. They are small, quiet, they don’t pull a lot of power and they are not too expensive when you get second-hand ones that are decomissioned from business environments.
The only thing is that they don’t have a lot of room for expansion/storahe. Some some have 1x M.2 port for NVMe + 1x 2.5" slot, some have 2x M.2 ports. Most don’t have PCie ports (apart a few Tinys) but if you want affordable nodes, they can be great!
Edit: you can read more here https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Hm okay thank you. I’ll read it
Keep tabs on https://rpilocator.com/ to check stock of Pi retailers around the globe.
Unless you need gpio pins, or an x86 architecture, get whatever is cheaper.
Things to keep in mind. Nuc’s tend to use special power adaptors, but have more raw horsepower. Pi’s can be driven via PoE. I have both and use both for different things.
If I know that I have a very specific use case in mind, and it doesn’t require a lot of CPU power, then I get a Raspberry Pi. I have learned the hard way though, that I should try to by original Raspberry and not one of the many alternatives that latch onto the same brand name. So, personally, I wouldn’t go for something like an Orange. Raspberry Pi might not be the cheapest nor the fastest, but it has the most reliable infrastructure and software support.
And I find that all of my devices inevitably live longer and need to be supported for longer than what I originally anticipate. And that’s a big pain, with hardware that has unpredictable and spotty software support.
If I need more power, then I absolutely prefer a full PC. As is, x86-64 still has the best support. I am getty too old to want to tinker for months on end to make my hardware work, when I could have spent a little more money to get something that works right away.
For containers/clustering, the nice thing is that you can split them across hardware devices pretty easily. A single powerful PC can run tons of containers that otherwise would need to be distributed across multiple smaller devices.
Having more than just one physical device can have advantages when upgrading gradually. But other than that, I would avoid gratuitously buying more devices than necessary. That just increase the burden to administer all these devices. More moving parts means more things that will break.
Well I want to do HA cluster with proxmox. Technically that requires x86 but if I understood the github page correctly pimox should be compatible to create a hybrid cluster. Because of the HA I am going to run them 24/7 which is why I want to have them a low energy to computation ratio. Any recommandations for stores ? But yeah the
get whatever is cheaper
Is the question. I am not able to compare them as I am lacking a bit of knowledge about stores and retailers
deleted by creator
What do you intend to use it for? I replaced my ryzen box with an OrangePi5 for power consumption reasons. Obviously the performance is not even close but turns out it was enough for Jellyfin, torrenting, pihole, and a Minecraft server.
I’m curious, can it handle transcoding? using the RPi 4 while direct playing works great, but for transcoding not so much… I see the OrangePi5 8GB is currently at 85$ looks like a good deal to me. The MC server would be another plus.
Do you know other alternatives like the OrangePi?
I haven’t managed to get the GPU properly working when passed through to a Jellyfin docker container, I think you need to recompile ffmpeg or something. If you can get that working I imagine the G610 would be great for it.
Software transcoding though has been great, I don’t need it too often but it’s a lot beefier than the Pi4 so I’ve had no troubles.
I don’t know much about other alternatives, but my understanding is they’ll mostly be between the performance of the Pi and any RK3588 board like the OrangePi. When you’re looking for one, make sure it has an armbian image.
Edit: I managed to get hardware transcoding using docker.io/jjm2473/jellyfin-mpp.
