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A few notes (as someone who is pretty staunchly anti-Pi-as-a-server, I end up having this debate often, and I do think there are reasons to do both): * A Pi will sit much lower in total power consumption than almost any used PCs if both are doing effectively nothing (ie - simple, spiky tasks like filtering DNS, serving static content from RAM, etc.). You need to be doing something with the system before a PC server comes out ahead, and most people using a Pi as a home server... aren't. Compared to a modern low-power x86 PC system, the difference isn't meaningful, but if you're buying used stuff 3 generations back, the difference becomes somewhat meaningful in terms of electric cost (on the order of tens of dollars per year, which is significant for hardware which cost tens of dollars to start with). * The Pi of course has GPIO, SPI, etc. exposed, so you can use it as a nice "hybrid-IoT" device where it's a home server _and_ a sensor aggregator, for example. And the hat ecosystem, while generally insanely overpriced, is convenient. Now, the moment you're running K8s/Docker or a real compute workload (security camera image recognition, etc.) you should probably move off of the Pi and onto something nicer, indeed. I absolutely never understood people running clusters of Pis or those goofy multi-Pi carrier boards. Just buy a real PC. |
For electricity consumption, beyond the wallet, it actually seems that hardware should have a lifespan on the order of decades before electricity consumption savings offset the environmental impact:
"For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential." —https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
Rather than buying a new Pi, repurposing a 5-year-old laptop has advantages if this something one cares about. Desktops are quite a bit more hungry (I've heard this got better in recent years), but I can attest that a 2012 laptop still functions very well as a server, easily better than a 2024-era Pi. Probably I'll replace it in the next 2-4 years (so at ~15yo) when my current laptop finally will have given me enough grief (my inner grandpa complains they don't make 'em like they used to), and I'm not saying others must optimise for climate alone either, but it's something to consider when deciding on a good balance