Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
I’ve heard good things about used/refurb HP (elite desk and pro desk) and Lenovo (m700 and m900) mini-pcs. A quick search shows they’re going for ~120-140$ for a quad core with 16 gigs of memory.
That’s what I’ve literally just traded up to from a Pi. Prodesk 600 G3 comes standard with a 6 core i5 8500, has 4 full size ram slots, an m2 ssd slot and has a mount for 3.5” hdd, all drawing only 65w.
There’s a low profile one as well but then you’re stuck with sodimm, no space for a full size hdd and no pci-e slots.
I picked it up second hand for NZD 100 so I imagine it would be even cheaper in the states.
I’ve been looking all over for something in that price range, where did you find them for those prices?
Ebay. Or whatever is your preferred local classified app.
Do prefer the Elite Desk though. The Pro only has one drive bay, so you’d have to use an adaptor to use the slim optical bay for a 2.5" drive. The Elite has 2x 3.5" bays and one 2.5" bay plus an NVMe slot so you can build a decent starter NAS. It’s also got 4 DIMM slots for up to 64 GB of memory and if you get a 7th gen Intel with it, it’ll have hardware accelerated transcoding.
Most of my services use a network mounted drive so storage isn’t really a factor (although the more the merrier of course).
My main bottleneck is computation power.
In that case a SFF would be better than either. There are great deals in the used market.
If you are fine with the slim: US amazon.