You don't need a Raspberry Pi
Kept you waiting, huh?
10 or so years ago, Raspberry Pis were all the rage. They were cheap, efficient, and small single board computers targeting the education market. Certain cost-saving measures like SD card storage allowed them to thrive in a market where there wasn't nearly as much real competition.
These days, Pis are notorious for their use in people's homelab (think LARPing as a sysadmin at home) setups. It's easy to see why. Noise, space and power constraints and expectations are very different when something's running directly at home versus out of the house in a server room.
However, Raspberry Pis have lost the plot. They've become so damn expensive that I think it's generally a poor idea to invest in them if your goals are to cut down on power, noise, and space for a simple computer.
Why they're so damn expensive nowadays
RPi Foundation has jacked up the prices on most of their computers in order to meet increased demand. Everyone wants one of these, and in a world with a relative chip storage that's STILL recovering from the pandemic, that's hard to pull off. It doesn't help that third-party sellers like Amazon get away with upcharging and listing these things for obscene prices.
Outside of that, Pis always have costed more than just the base board for any real meaningful use case. At minimum, you'll need a cheap SD card which will set you back around $10 or so, and DC voltage. That's not taking into account:
- Maybe you need a display.
- Maybe you need a HAT Power-over-Ethernet or gigabit support.
- Maybe you need a HAT for SATA ports.
As you can see, buying from a first-party seller and adding
Pis use add-on boards called HATs that attach to the GPIO pins on the board itself for expandability. The list goes on. There's, of course, an appeal to the modularity of devices like these. However, I'd argue that by the time you factor in a lot of the extra bits and bobs to have a functional computer for your use case, there's a better, more affordable option for not much more that doesn't consume that much more power.
What to get instead
Thin clients
It depends on your needs and what the used market looks like in your country, but I would pay close attention to cheap, older thin clients online. These are quiet, power efficient, cheap devices sold in bulk in office settings to offer a simple display and input to connect to a more taxing computer. They're used often for remote-desktop tasks and things like that. Of course, when distributed in bulk, they have to be pretty quiet and efficient.
Fortunately, in the US, there's a healthy used market of these things. Don't take my recommendations as word of God as there may be a better choice present for your needs.
The HP T620 is one of the thin clients I like, and it's the one running a handful of crucial services in my homelab. It struggles with a full-on desktop OS, but light server tasks barely push the CPU. When configured properly, it sips about 6-10W from the wall. That's a little more than a Pi 4, but it's at least twice as powerful.
The T620 has a gigabit NIC, which is more than enough for me. It would be nice if it had at least two so it could see use as a router, however. Thankfully, there's plenty of other thin clients you can pick up for cheap that can handle that task no problem.
The Plus model offers more expandability at a higher price. Both of these, however, have a decent distribution of USB ports, 2.5 inch SATA drive support, upgradable RAM, and upgradable M.2 storage. All of these things are either impossible to have with a Pi, or demand significant compromises.
HP T620 workarounds
I actually did have a weird issue. I couldn't boot into any Linux distro to install a server OS over the default thin client one. I tried booting straight off a USB drive and over the network with PXE. The solution turned out to be booting into Ventoy, which worked just fine and let me install my distro of choice.
Mini PCs
"Mini PCs" in my eyes refers largely to these tiny Chinese computers with power efficient CPUs in them. They also refer to Intel NUCs. These are really performant and with the Alder Lake N100 chip you can run almost anything within the scope of a homelab. The graphics on the N100 are great for transcoding and decoding media on a Jellyfin or Plex instance. These will set you back $150 or so, give or take, which is obviously outside the scope of the cheaper Pis. However, it makes the more expensive Pi 4/B and 5 look like a joke considering how close the price is for an infinitely more powerful computer. A lot of these mini PCs sip power too, with the N100 chip having a TDP of 6W. TDP isn't a perfect indication of efficiency at idle and under load, but it gives you a general idea of how good the hardware is.
USFF PCs
If your needs are a little more demanding, there's a ton of small "standard" computers you can pick up. While sometimes getting power efficient computers in this range is a challenge, there's plenty of good deals. Do your research and you could have a perfectly capable and small computer that can run almost everything you need.
Some old shit you have lying around
...At the end of the day, an old laptop or desktop PC lying around might be perfectly fine. There are obvious limitations to these. Laptops aren't really designed to serve content under a consistent 24/7 load and the battery always being plugged in and charging presents a risk. Desktops can be loud and power-hungry. However, if these concerns aren't necessarily a problem for you, your old computer sealed away in your closet may not be a terrible option. If the concern is power efficiency, you're probably in it to save money long-term. You should probably sit down and do the math: is the upfront cost of a new computer with better power savings ultimately leading me to spend less money than my current one?
Ideas for what to run
You might be in a situation where you haven't sat down and bought or even considered running light, low-power services on your hardware. I've written an article a little while back on the topic if you're curious. Self-hosting content: why you should care, and how to start Here's a couple suggestions I didn't name before:
CasaOS is a easy to use frontend for newcomers to familiarize themselves with common self-hosted applications.
Home Assistant is a useful tool for home automation. Think smart lights and thermostat controls and security cameras.
Uptime Kuma is an easy-to-use WYSIWYG uptime monitor for your various services. It takes a lot of the guesswork out, and you can even configure it to send out emails and notifications when things are down.
For me, the idea is generally to focus on light applications that I expect to always have running. I don't necessarily want all of my smart home devices around the house to be inaccessible if I have to reboot a more powerful home server. It's up to you at the end of the day, however.
Advantages of Pis
Pis have the advantage of having a very mature ecosystem. A lot of these used x86 computers have pretty much zero support or community to fall back on with similar hardware. Pis have tons of fixes, documentation, adapters, cases, you name it. If you run into quirks (think weird power management issues, or trouble booting into a Linux OS), you're mostly on your own. However, I think most of these problems are very fixable and shouldn't be too big of a deal. Pis are also great for actually making use of the GPIO pins for various use cases. I myself used one to flash coreboot onto an old ThinkPad.
Take YouTube promotions with a grain of salt
YouTubers have a vested interest in promoting technology that they advertise on their channel and painting it in a positive light. Pis aren't a terrible option for all tasks, but I've seen way too many people decide to invest in one thinking it's the best option for their various around-the-house services. Use good judgment and keep an eye on the used market, especially the types of computers I named above.