Recommendations for cheap hardware upgrade

Hello everyone,

I am running some services like Jellyfin, Radarr, QBittorrent, Jellyseerr and some others on my Raspberry Pi 4. The problem is that it is already struggling to run those, since it has only 2GB of RAM. I wish it was possible to do a RAM upgrade to the Raspberry Pi but the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. I don’t want to buy another Raspberry Pi with more RAM because they are quite expensive and I don’t want to have two of them. So can you recommend something for around or under 100€?

Thanks in advance.

dingdongitsabear,

I don’t understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.

any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you’ll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that’s useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.

yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don’t come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.

vegetaaaaaaa,
@vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world avatar

I agree that desktop/ATX tower PCs are the most useful form factor, you can stuff all your old junk hardware in there and offer it a second life without much investment.

However with current electricity prices buying more power efficient hardware can be a better medium-term investment. 1kWh bills at 0.2516€ currently where I’m at (~EU average price), assuming an average power consumption of 50W this gives you (50×24×365)/1000×0.2516=110€/year. At this rate a 200€ investment in hardware would pay for itself in 2-3 years.

Buying a <100€ setup is not worth it for general purpose servers in my opinion, it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

My current solution is to to run all my services in KVM (libvirt) VMs on my beefy desktop computer which is already on most of the time anyway. Best of both worlds.

If I had to redo everything I would probably buy a NUC/mini-PC with a good CPU, 64GB RAM and low power consumption, stash a single huge SSD in there, migrate my VMs there and call it a day. But this is not a cheap setup.

TedZanzibar,

it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

Or both!

witx,

They are power and space efficient, and usually very quiet. That’s fascinating enough.

dingdongitsabear,

I have acknowledged that they’re that, but that’s not what OP asked for - they asked for a cheap setup (which the minis ain’t) and they intend to run a servarr instance, which implies large storage and those are both difficult and not cheap to cram into said minis.

witx, (edited )

It depends on your needs. I have minis that cost <100$ and have others that cost 500$. My cheapest mini has currently 3TB of backups of my personal things, so it serves my needs very cheaply. I don’t need a GPU so it keeps the costs down.

ThillyGooth,

Check out the Dell Wyse 5070. You can find them used within your budget.

BrightCandle,

I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.

possiblylinux127,

Look for a used minipc on eBay and similar sites

x3i,

I don't see anyone mentioning sth power efficient yet, so I will throw my two cents in here; I just ordered an Odroid M1S to take over some jobs from my RPi4 (8GB). Has not yet arrived so I cannot praise it yet but might be worth a look!

ShaunaTheDead,
ShaunaTheDead avatar

I think upgrading the RAM as you mentioned is going to make a big difference. While the physical RAM might be soldered to the motherboard, you could buy a fairly cheap SD card or USB and set the system up to use that as virtual memory. It won't be as fast as actual RAM but it might help and large SD cards are honestly really cheap these days.

x3i,

I would agree here if we would be talking about fast interfaces but for the RPi, this unfortunately does not work, SD is too slow. You can clearly tell when it swaps out since the whole system starts to freeze

Nomecks, (edited )

An HP EliteDesk G4 mini desktop Is around that much

slackj_87,

2nd this. Cheap, upgrade-able, more powerful than the pi, and not limited to ARM. Only thing the Pi has on this is power consumption and GPIO.

h3ndrik, (edited )

A second-hand used laptop. Or an used Intel NUC.

I’d say it’s difficult to buy anything new for $100 that’s actually worth spending that money.

I’d recommend one if the Mini PCs like

But that’s about twice your budget with a decent amount of RAM and some storage. (And way faster than a RasPi.)

TheFinn,

I may have purchased that exact item from Amazon a few months ago. It is 100% worth saving up for a bit to purchase something this good. Debian stable is fully supported. It’s currently just my streaming client but it’s pretty powerful and sips power compared to off lease desktops or even laptops.

h3ndrik, (edited )

Out of curiosity: Did you measure the idle power consumption?

TheFinn,

That’s a good point, I actually have not. I came to that conclusion based on the reviews I’ve read.

Sims,

Cheapest upgrade? Cram an old Android mobile in the USB port, and run a few services on that via Termux…

contrefeu,
@contrefeu@akko.contref.eu avatar

@VitabytesDev @selfhosted there are miniPCs with Intel's n100 chip 8Gb ram and 256Gb SSD like this one on AliExpress https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006141099278.html at 97€

ordellrb, (edited )

If you need more ram but not a lot of CPU a used thin client can work, i use a HP t630 since 6 months now with only nextcloud and storage, has 2 ddr4 slots and 2sata m.2(not Nvme) for Expansion. Again its a 4core Pre Ryzen AMD chip so don’t expect any Wonders. www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t630/ this is a good side for this and other thin Clients.

Edit: according to HP the idle Power consumption is ~12w

Mountain_Mike_420,

And that’s the problem right there. That’s 12w idle power. The computer is not going to idle all the time and power consumption will rise. If you are like me and live in a place with high cost of power this will add up. The raspberry pi will is at max 9w of power. That’s max. At idle it’s more likely to be around 3 but could be more if you have some usb drives plugged into it.

Maybe consider selling your pi2g and buying a pi4g or 8g.

beeng,

If your workload doesn’t run well on a raspi you cannot use a raspi…

Mountain_Mike_420,

They said they were bumping up to the ram limit on their 2gb pi. I suggested getting a pi with 4 or 8 gb of ram.

criitz,

I had the same issue as you and I bought a mini PC for under $200 and it works like a charm

VitabytesDev,

Can you tell me the specs?

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

If you want the small footprint and power costs are a concern, look for a second hand mini computer. Dell, Lenovo, Intel nuc.

Something like this as an example.

zloubida,
@zloubida@lemmy.world avatar

I always thought that mini computer.were more power hungry than SBC. Am I wrong?

exu,

Yeah, they’re more power hungry, but they’re also way more performant than a pi 4.

zloubida,
@zloubida@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks.

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

No but less power hungry than a full desktop. It’s a good trade-off between power and performance.

VitabytesDev, (edited )

I found an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF at 100€ here. It has an Intel core i5 4th Gen and 8GB of RAM. Not exactly mini but cheap. Do you think it’s worth it?

EDIT: nvm I found this used Intel nuc here with the same specs.

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