[ianhowson]

Seconding this. X200/210/220 are dirt cheap, come with modern CPUs, cooling fans (!), quality Ethernet ports and run x86-64 containers unmodified. You can cram 16GB of RAM and SATA SSDs into an X220.

Much less hassle and similar price to an RPi.

[devenblake]

Please don't use the X220 or T420 for servers though.. They're the go-to main laptops for many Thinkpad fans because they're so inexpensive and very well-built for everyday use. There are only so many left. I can't imagine using another laptop besides my T420, I'm not sure a better laptop exists and I'm gonna have to take it to my grave if Lenovo doesn't get their act together and release another Thinkpad with a full keyboard.

That being said, good computers going to good people for them is always a good thing no matter the use case.

[foxhop]

T430 is fine too, its my daily driver and has the same charger as the T420.

I run SmartOS on another t430 with a cracked screen which has a bunch of guest KVM and zones. Runs ZFS in a mirror and 16G ram, backed by an APC unit for the modem router.

I blogged recently about my setup here:

https://russell.ballestrini.net/weechat-on-boot-in-a-tmux-se...

(Hosted on said laptop)

[ChuckNorris89]

Where the hell is a X200 is similarly priced to a RPi?!

In my neck o the woods(Austria) a X200 series is around 150-200 Euros. Add 16GB of Ram and an SSD an you're looking at at least 250 Euros instead of just 40 for a PI.

[ianhowson]

My beef with the Pi is that it's not just EUR40 for the device; you also need to add on:

- power supply

- quality SD card

- heatsinks

- a case

and then deal with

- non-x86

- thermal issues

- SD cards

- the CPU is too tiny to do anything useful anyway

Sorry to hear that X2x0 is expensive where you live. I find that the small additional investment over the RPi is worthwhile.

[sdenton4]

Ha. My home server for a very long time was a RPi 3B+. Totally fine for all kinds of background home server-y tasks, including running a local jupyter server for one-off calculations. (When I need a lot of cpu for something, I probably need a beefy gpu, which is a whole other beast.)

Power supply: It's USB powered. For a home server, I find it convenient to plug it into a USB port on the router, to which it is also connected for ethernet.

SDCard: It was set up to only use the sdcard to boot and use a USB stick as root, which gets around all of the sdcard issues. This is not a totally plug-and-play experience, though. My understanding is that the newer firmwares finally allow direct boot from USB, though.

Case: You can DIY it easily. The case for my home server was basically a folded piece of cardstock on which I drew a picture of a once-bitten pear. Other times I've used legos or dremel tooled altoid tins.

Heat sink: Unnecessary prior to the Pi4. (which also ramped up the cpu and power usage quite a bit...) They keep producing the older models, so it's mainly a matter of picking where you want to live on the compute vs heat management scale.

[ChuckNorris89]

You forgot to add the extra power consumption of a laptop vs a pi. It adds up.

[diffeomorphism]

You do?

Heatsink and case were totally optional in my experience (or a case would make thermals worse). Power supply maybe, if your phone charger did not already work. SD Card or flashdrive; I have many of these lying around.

There is something to be said for having keyboard, pointing device and screen included with a used laptop, but the stuff you list it seems you just don't actually need.

[NortySpock]

Curious what workloads you're intending to run on the RPI that you find the CPU is tiny.

Granted, the RPi2 had a slow CPU, but I am finding the RPi4 is snappy enough for "serve a website out of a docker container" workloads. I am hitting SD card I/O limits faster than I hit CPU limits.