I’m getting close to my 4gb RPI 4b’s mem limit ~80% and would like to migrate from it to a low power SFF thin client. What are some good options?
If you have a college or university near you, search online to see if they have a property disposition department.
I just got an HP Z2 SFF from my local university for $182. It has a Core i7-8700, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVME SSD.
Nice! Ill give this a shot, as I have something like 5 unis near me
It’s not the route I’ve gone, but lots of people seem to be having success with retired small form factor business machines. Getting a good deal on used business stuff seems to be the key, ideally locally, where they just want to get rid of it compared to ebay. A low-end Intel from 4 years ago is annoyingly good computation per watt.
Also, take your power bill and calculate the cost of a watt for a year. Remember that number for all future purchases. Where I live, it’s around $1.50/watt-year. A 60-watt always-on computer gets pricy quickly.
That’d be my go to option probably if I wanted to move off my Pi’s. Locally something like a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 (ex business) on deal sites are not much more than a Raspberry Pi, especially the past 24 months where supply of Pis has been hit hard. Those small form factor PC’s probably come with an SSD also which I’d take over an SD card for ruggedness any day, and if you had to buy one and a caddy because you don’t have any spare, the Pi is possibly costing more than the Intel PC at that point. More ports (and more convenient display output if you need it) etc too.
As you say, power consumptions the one thing to keep an eye out for I’d say, but those systems are relatively efficient.
I run proxmox so I have a VM dedicate to HA OS with frequent backups. This allows me to also run a number of other things without worrying about inadvertently messing up my HA install
Same here, running on a HP mini pc I bought from ebay.
So some questions to ask:
- Do you need x86, ARM, RISC-V, or MIPS?
- You say low power… but what are your power and cooling requirements? USB power? DC 12V? AC 120V? Fanless?
- What are your use cases, beyond homeassistant? (webserver, ids/pihole/vpn, kodi/plex/jellyfin, torrents, opennas)?
- What is your budget?
There are a few prebuilt NUCs out there with Intel or AMD ultra low power chips, with TDPs around 25-35W, but these may be overkill, and around $600-900. Otherwise, maybe resell the 4GB for an 8GB instead?
- I’d lean towards x86 with ARM being a close second.
- Energy use isn’t much of an issue for me, I just don’t want to run something needlessly power hungry to run HASS. Passive cooling works, fan fine as well.
- No need for anything beyond HASS. I have an Unraid server that I host all of my other stuff on, but keep that tucked away as it’s quite large.
- I’d like to cap out around $150-225
Just looking to upgrade, and as raspberry pi’s are hard to come by these days (what happened to them being more available in 2023 btw) I’m leaning towards something more SFF.
What do you think of the Intel NUC 11 Essentials with Celeron M4505? It is only two cores, but is clocked faster and has way better memory performance. If you are only running homeassistant, the low core count shouldn’t be a significant hindrance.
I also see the celeron 5105 in the Intel store on Amazon; same thing but quad core. About $200.
That looks like a good fit! Thanks for the suggestion
