Yes, you can optimize a lot. Especially with Linux. I did the same and even started to replace program that did too much, bloated, with my own programs. To speed up the development I did it with AI and Cursor.
I’ve found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.
A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I’ve found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.
Kubernetes is designed to improve reliability
That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.
I bought a decade old Z840 and it’s great for VMs, Plex, Arr stack, and a few other services but it is so overkill with 2 GPUs. I think what I should’ve done was buy a couple of used desktops or laptops to expand the my homelab as I needed.
a pie is neat. thats it. does it have enough ram for hosting & running all your containers? no.
Why not rasberry pi with kubernetes?
The HAT-ability of RPi makes them enough for me. You can add sata ports, PCIe, and more with a simple HAT.
any recommendations on hats for sata?
Been running one from Radxa for a while. Just make sure to check the power requirements of your drives.
An n100 PC is much better than that crapberry pi
jesus christ what a nice burn
Certainly tempted by one, any particular ones to look for? UK here, currys out of stock on an MSI one and Amazon is full of names I have never heard of and half the time it comes with Windows pro which is just a waste of money buying with the hardware.
I got the ASRock motherboard with the n100 cpu and built a PC with it. Right now, I just have it running two 3 TB hhds in a zfs mirror and it’s working nicely.
I wanted to get a raspberry pi at first but it was stupidly expensive in my country and, for what it offered compared to a normal x86 system, it was not worth it.
N100 is two years old now. If you’re going to suggest a mini PC, at least suggest one with a current gen CPU.
I was thinking more about a motherboard with that cpu, but we can go with the n150 then
I am seeing N100 mini PCs for a lot less than N150s though
I think any mini-pc/old laptop is better, and probably cheaper than a raspberry pi nowadays
I would have disagreed with you when Pis were like $50 and chaining 3 Pis together with a hard drive was a fun project to do self hosting.
Now to get to the beefiest raspberry pi, it’s $120. And in the range, yeah, for price and reliability, use a mini-pc/laptop.
I think the pi zero might have a place, don’t have one but at least it is actually cheap. Used an old laptop before, now running stuff on my PC which I feel was a bit of a mistake in a way but it started as one process and more appeared over time.
At some point would like to move it into a VM tbh, then I could copy the VM to a mini PC at a later date. Or easily copy it when reinstalling the OS on my main PC. VM for convenience and separating it from my general PC usage.
Pi zero 2 runs my home automation smoothly and few of it’s sisters are in a desk drawer in case of equipment failure. It has quite enough oomph to run Home Assistant with zigbee hat.
Yeah honestly i can’t get anything done with a raspberry. Maybe i host too many services ?
Honestly Raspberry Pis are pretty underpowered as hosts for more than a handful of super basic services, and given they consume 20-30w at minimum you’re easily getting into used office desktop territory where you can get a ton more performance right out of the gate.
The real value in the raspberry pi is in the GPIO and the cohesive ecosystem of accessories to plug into said GPIO. You can do so many cool automations and controls using just an RPi (especially if combined with something that can’t be accomplished more cheaply and easily with an ESP32) but as a server host they’re pretty crap in comparison to a decade old business PC off of eBay
I’ve got 3x RPi 4/5 with external drives and other USB running ~10 containers at 4-6W each. How did you make them draw 20W?
Nah, they are underpowered for their current price. When you could get your hand on a raspberry pi 3 for 35€ 10 years ago it was a bargain. But now it’s not the case.
I need
It’s just fun to play with, there is no “need”.
Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don’t really want nor need that 😄
See, I don’t pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
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I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
I still like vms on digital ocean. I guess I’m a seething soydev.
I use a DO droplet with docker compose. Filthy dev here too. Much cheaper overtime than buying and hosting home server equipment.
Some stuff you want to have in your house though, like storage and stuff like home assistant.
I’d never trust DO with my vintage europorn collection
Raspberry Pis are way overhyped and overpriced.
Also this is totally wrong. Once you start it just keeps growing unless there is some other factor.
You’re just in the middle of the curve still …
And yes, pi’s are waaaaaay overpriced now. Get a used mini pc with a 6500T in it for server needs. It’s more than enough and maxes out at 65W. Most of the time it idles near 12W.
Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna…
