[don-code]

My homelab, up until the beginning of last year, consisted completely of Raspberry Pi's - gen 1 through 4. Because they're so resource constrained, adding new services in my homelab meant adding more Pi's. Pi's themselves then became near-impossible to buy, which meant I couldn't expand anymore.

I bought a set of four 10-year-old HP rackmount servers instead - 56 cores, 88GB of RAM, and 12TB of storage total (note: I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern). They run Kubernetes for workload scheduling. All told, it cost about $500 to acquire all of the equipment.

Honestly, I haven't looked back to the Pi days. Provisioning a new service in my homelab used to have a lead time of two weeks (acquire a Pi, image it, install services, etc.), and now I can deploy something new in 15-30 minutes. I learned a ton through running systems on resource-constrained ARM32 devices like those, but it's ultimately not a great use for them.

[nicolaslem]

> I pay for the electricity solely with home solar, so the ~400w idle isn't a financial concern.

Maybe not a financial concern but probably an environmental one. Yearly that is 3.5 MWh that could be used to de-carbonate the grid instead.

[eep_social]

Probably not actually, but nice concern troll.

[ocdtrekkie]

Arguably in the winter that 400W is also helping heat their house, and depending on what type of furnace they use, may be reducing some of their dependency on natural gas.

[gh02t]

Unfortunately that is similarly offset by the extra need to cool in warmer weather. Though it's interesting to think about given you have to factor in different system efficiencies for different power and heat/cool types as well as climate. Figuring out where the balance actually lies is gonna be different for everybody.

[ocdtrekkie]

Ah, but if their cooling is electric, and hence in their case, solar, and their heat is natural gas, this is still better. =)

That being said, it's entirely possible for someone who has a solar set up to also have switched to electric heat, it's just pretty uncommon in northern climates still.

Generally though, yeah, I prefer NUCs and the like over servers for home use for power and noise constraints.

[DeathArrow]

I think Pis are good for fun and for tinkering cheaply with ARM architecture. Server hardware will always better once the workload is heavy enough.