Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
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And for some (including me) that's our only computer (other than phone). I just can't afford anything, so all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video. I deeply want something better, especially a steam deck, but doesn't look like that'll happen anytime soon (or ever).
And then you see people have steam decks that just sit there, unused, gathering dust.... fuck.Honestly, if you're in the States I have a bunch of HP ProDesks that my wife would be very happy to see disappear from our basement (I bid on an auction I didn't expect to win lol). I'd happily send one for the cost of shipping
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Laptop chargers are no fire hazards anymore than raspberry pi PSUs are. In fact probably the RPi parts are worse as they are built down to a cost.
I would assume that landfill laptop manufacturers are trying to minimize costs even harder on the charger.
but what timeframe do you mean with "anymore"? laptops made in this decade, or the last 10 years, or something else? there's plenty of old laptops that fitinto OPs category.
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Laptops don't even use that much power. You guys are really not into home labbing or as good with tech as you think you are lol. Lots of people run older real servers and desktops as home servers. They use way more power than laptops. Raspberry Pis sound good but use progressively more power in each generation, and still struggle to compete with mini PCs and even older laptops in performance. They also never had good performance per watt. In performance per watt basically nothing beats a Mac Mini, though other mini PCs are also good. Laptops aren't bad in energy efficiency either. They are literally designed to run on battery so have as little idle draw as possible. They would be comparable to a mini PC if you turn off the display.
Edit: Modern RPis apparently use 25W, which is firmly in the territory of what a laptop would use when not running the screen or charging the battery.
Jesus 25W is about what a miniPC would consume at a constant 30-50% load!
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Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work's IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
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Did someone fall asleep on the keyboard when they came up with kjiji?
I think it's secretly Khajiit's new marketplace for wares if you have the coin
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
Also, Raspberry Pi first got popular because of the size and cost. Now it's popular because it's popular. Not hating on them, I think they're cool, but they're not cheap any more. Especially with the scalping.
Getting x86_64 based systems is going to mean much less headache. Unless you truly truly need the size I wouldn't consider getting a Pi or other SBC. Just go to literally any used marketplace (Facebook, Craigslist, etc) and get anything.
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Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
No reason why a laptop wouldn't work though.
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Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors... Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there's something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL) RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL) Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59 -
The market is about to be flooded with them with Windows 10 going EoL in October.
About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft's supported list for the last year or more. I've seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone
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damn you all, now I impulse bought an old thin client for 30EUR
but, fwiw: I mostly use RPi for my purposes, up to RPi4; RPi 5 I think missed the mark, with its active cooling requirement and power use. (and price...) the only use case where an i86 alternative is justified is my jellyfin setup (where realtime transcoding is needed).As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.
Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...
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All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
And they passively cool better that way much of the time too...
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Back when I lived in a (quite nice) apartment building I was constantly surprised at the things people threw out. Perfectly good furniture but also stuff like perfectly functional printers, artwork, computer cases...
If you go near college housing there's usually a given day of the year (either moving day or an official cleanup day) when tons of people put out stuff they don't want to bother with keeping/moving. It's Hippie Christmas baby!
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No reason why a laptop wouldn't work though.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I mean, a lot of things would work, I could power it all with potato batteries if I had enough. The Pi Zero 2 W only cost ~£15 anyway.
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
A good "rule of thumb" to remember: if your electricity rates average (somewhere near) $0.11/kWh you can take the average power draw of a device in watts and that is equal to what it will cost to run that device 24-7 for 365 days.
So, if that cheap PC draws 50W more than an alternate solution, it's costing you $50 more per year to use it.
Some tasks are beyond any RasPi, but it's well worth evaluating if something like an N100 fanless mini-PC can handle it instead of loading up some Core i7 rig that's going to cost more to run in the first year than the N100 costs to buy.
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Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
But... that's so uncool...
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I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors... Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there's something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL) RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL) Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59I have never felt the need to have a wired connection for my DNS/DHCP, since such a trivial amount of data exchanges hands. The quality of the wired connection if it had one would similarly have negligible impact, surely.
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And that's 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.
But I want to be cool and awesome! I want to constantly re-learn how to do basic things over and over because TECHNOLOGY!!!
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23718473&cid=65450499
And I think China is evil and dumb... but I click "add to cart" on aliexpress in my sleep!
But I am deeply worried about totally renewable energy consumption by buying an endless stream of disposable baubles!
(Read above in some kind of sarcastic tone)
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
That depends if the mini-PC is something in the Celeron / N100 family, or the Core i5/i7 family.
