My current setup consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4gb RAM and a 1tb external SSD. I’m thinking of getting a used mini PC for around 100€ to replace that tho because it would give me a lot more power and especially RAM (I currently need to use an 8gb swap file). My plan so far is to get a used mini PC that’s quiet, has a built-in SSD and at least 8gb of RAM (16 would be better). Because of the built-in SSD, I could also sell the external SSD and buy an 8-12tb HDD instead.
Does anyone have recommendations for what mini PC to get or things that I should look out for?
Edit: Thanks for all the help! I decided on the Firebat T8 Pro Plus with 16gb RAM and 512gb internal storage because that really seems to be perfect for my use case.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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I got an HP ProDesk 400 G2 with an i5 6500T, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for 99€. Works beautifully, and while it’s not as efficient as a raspberry pi, it idles around 6-7w and can run a bunch of VMs with Proxmox.
How many VMs can you reasonably run with only 8GB of RAM?
Depends on your needs. I have a couple LXDs that only need 512MB each… But I did upgrade mine to 16GB.
With that budget I find it hard to imagine you could beat the Raspberry Pi, but please post what you do find!
Actually, I found the Firebat T8 Pro Plus, which has an Intel N100, 16gb LPDDR5 RAM and a 512gb M.2 SSD. It’s more than 5 times faster than the Pi, has AV1 decoding and a power draw of 27W (not TDP, this number is from independent tests). It goes for 146€ on Aliexpress. It’s a little more than 100€ but for what I’m getting here, I think it’s worth it.
It’s a little more than 100€
It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.
Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”
If I were you, I would look at the chinese offerings on aliexpress. If you carefully read the spec sheets, you can find excellent price/performance
Just looked around and there are mini PCs for around 130€ with Intel N100 CPUs, which have a 6W TDP, AV1 decoding and they beat an i5 6500T (that one’s in a 130€ Dell Optiplex I found on ebay) in single core and gets close enough in multicore. Is there some kind of catch I’m not seeing with that CPU? Because it looks perfect for my use case.
Can’t quite speak for the n100 but I got a n305 one of these “China PCs” it’s passively cooled (which was important since it’s running in my bedroom) and seems to have amazing performance for what I need (I put jellyfin on there). I’m quite happy after futzing around with ARM SBCs and external drives this just works so well.
