Can a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM handle my needs?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I recently bought a domain from Porkbun (thanks to all of the comments on this post!) and I want to self-host some services myself. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and I’m not quite sure if it can handle these things:

A matrix homeserver
A lemmy instance
A website with static HTML pages
Privacy-respecting frontends (Piped, Redlib etc.)

I am thinking about getting a maxed-out Raspberry Pi 5 with a whole 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Is it worth it? I need a machine that is quiet, doesn’t draw that much power and is overall pretty good for the money.

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MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
A Pi 5 8GB is very expensive once you buy the power supply, case, cooling, adapters, etc… And you’re stuck with ARM64 stuff which doesn’t support some things.

Personally in your shoes I would spend $80 or so on a USFF PC with an 8th or 9th gen Intel CPU off ebay.

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Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I replaced 4x Pi4 4gb with a single N95 mini PC with 16gb ram and wont look back.

Only PI left in my home is just running a 24/7 USBIP bridge.

the only reason to use a pi is if you need GPIO pins for custom devices.

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- lemmyingly@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  USBIP bridge as in USB over ethernet?
  
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  - Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Yip, I have a Linux VM running on one of my boxes in the garage that is plugged into a video matrix so I can bring it up on any screen in the house, I use the pi to connect Keyboard/Mouse/controllers etc to that when I’m using it.
    
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DaseinPickle@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Why not get an Intel N100? It’s about the same price and much better performance. Raspberry Pis is kind of overpriced these days.

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- AtariDump@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Because I can’t power an N100 via PoE.
  
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  - Atemu@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    You probably could. Though I don’t see the point in powering a home server over PoE.
    
    A random SBC in the closet? Sure. Not a home server though.
    
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- AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I’ve never heard of Intel N100 before, what’s that? Just so you know, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 Gigabytes of RAM costs ~90€ in my country (Germany). I wouldn’t really count that as overpriced. Could you show me some machine examples with Intel N100?
  
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  - cron@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I think he meant something like these mainboards (german comparison portal). These mainboards contain the CPU.
    
    However, you also need memory, a case, storage and a power supply, which brings you closer to 200€.
    
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  - popcorp@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Look into beelink mini s12 pro for example. Currently 199 eur on Amazon. Just install Linux on it and Bob’s your uncle. It’s x86 so no weird arm issues. Full support of the hw in mainline kernel.
    
    Intel, 500 GB SSD , 16 GB ram, GPU acceleration, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, 1 Gbps link. You can add another SSD drive. Raspberry is clearly an underdog here.
    
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  - DaseinPickle@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That’s cheap. If a raspberry pi 5 with power supply, case, nvme ssd is about 270 euro in my country. That’s about the same for a N100 mini pc.
    
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  - Lifebandit666@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    feddit.uk/comment/7847340
    
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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Why not get a minipc? For the same cost you can get way more performance

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Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m running my Matrix and Lemmy on a VM smaller than that, so it should be fine. Just don’t run it off an SD card as the others have said, because that’s going to be a database heavy workload which means loads of writes to storage.

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- lemonuri@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Another option would be to install an im server that is low on resources and not eating your sdcard. I think xmpp would work a lot better on a pi. Prosody, ejabberd or snikket should work nicely.
  
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TheProtector0034@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution antmore it used to be in the past. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.

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- Landless2029@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  My go to is a refurbished slim mini pc. Like a dell or HP for sub $100
  
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- sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I’ve got a BeeLink N100 system that’s just a bit bigger than a NUC, has two 2.5Gb LAN ports and came with a 512gb nvme drive. Works a treat as a Jellyfin server with TONS of processor and ram headroom. N100 is a great little chip, so long as you’re not expecting i5+ power.
  
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BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
If you don’t need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.

If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.

A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.

A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.

The YouTube channel “Hardware Haven” has a bunch of random old “junk” computers he’s worked on.

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- towerful@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I agree.
  Pis are great for tinkering, GPIO things, or ultra low power.
  Plenty of older hardware out there that is as powerful (or more so), more reliable (ie, not an sd card), and more maintainable (ie can swap CPU/ram/disks/fans/psu).
  But, power consumption is always a concern. At $0.30/kwh, 10 watts is $27 per year.
  So, if a pi draws 5w and an SFF draw 25w, thats $55 per year. Any price benefit of a larger/older PC is negligiable after a year or 2, so reliability probably wont come into it.
  
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  - BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The last video from “hardware haven” I saw (not the last released, just the last I saw) found:
    
    Fuzzy memory on details: a 5th or 6th gen Intel idled at 7 watts vs an ultra efficient at 5 watts. He calculated out that it would take 2-4 years, depending on your electricity, to pay for the cost difference of a new ultra low power machine. CPUs and even graphic cards have gotten much better at idling very low.
    
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  - AtariDump@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Is there a computer I can power via PoE?
    
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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
You will need an NVMe adapter and a bigger SSD to store the Matrix database and it will put a lot of stress on the system if you join bigger rooms.

Otherwise it should be fine, although I personally would recommend skipping Matrix all together and rather install an lightweight XMPP server (and if you really need it a Matrix gateway for that).

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Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.

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- possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  By leaps and bounds
  
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  - Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Not sure if that much, their CPU benchmark is pretty close.
    
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- AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Is a Pentium powerful enough? I recently found a YouTube channel called “Wolfgang’s Channel” and he also has a home server with a Pentium. He says it is plenty enough for these kind of tasks.
  
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  - Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    If that’s not powerful enough a raspberry pi isn’t either, that CPU ranks slightly higher than the one on a pi 5 cpubenchmark.net/…/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz…
    
    Also I don’t know how I forgot about this (since it’s what I do a lot of the times), but you can buy from other Amazon’s in Europe, for example in Spain you can get this CPU www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-65… which is almost double the benchmark of a Pi for 127 amzn.eu/d/6UwsUqf
    
    Those mini PCs are awesome, the only reason my home server isn’t one of them is because I have a 3.5" HDD which doesn’t fit in them, but I’m looking to switch to some other alternative because the franken-desktop I have now uses too much power for what it’s doing.
    
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thantik@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I bought a CN62 Chromebox, and put MrChromebox’s Bios on it – I did the rounds comparing it with a Pi 4 and it was 2.5x faster, and could easily saturate my gigabit connection. It came with 16gb of storage, and 2gb of ram; but using ACTUAL DRAM slots. I could upgrade it to 16gb if I needed to down the line.

The whole thing, cost me like $45 shipped; power supply, storage, everything needed…

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sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
As someone that has only recently started selfhosting stuff, I can’t offer much advice. But having bought an RPi5, which runs most of my things, I’ll tell you this finding from my research. They’re awesome, but the SD cards don’t last long, so ideally you want to minimise the writes. I’m not sure a Matrix server allows you to do that. Though it absolutely can handle all of the above.

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- AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  but the SD cards don’t last long
  
  This is what scare me the most. Ideally, I want a whole SSD to store data. I really don’t want to lose any important data. I plan on hosting public services (like the services I’ve mentioned above) under my domain, so having a reliable drive would be really helpful.
  
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  - atzanteol@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    General rule: if you have “important data” don’t go cheap. Get a real computer. Have backups. Test them.
    
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  - sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Yeah. You can pretty much mitigate all of your concerns with an SSD. But I’ve never run anything public facing. So make sure you confirm that there’s people running said services on Pis before you pull the trigger.
    
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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage

PSU Power Supply Unit

SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

[Thread #615 for this sub, first seen 19th Mar 2024, 23:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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Fewer Letters	More Letters
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PSU	Power Supply Unit
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage