Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
Also check out:
Yawn.
A mini/micro is 20x the volume of a Pi.
Use-case matters, I use an SFF as a file server and media player, and a Pi for PiHole, Tailscale, etc.
I've also setup a Pi as a dash cam with wifi so it auto uploads when I get home. Can't see using an SFF/Mini/Micro the same way.
Yes, the Pi costs more per MFLOP or whatever performance metric you want to use, but it excels in compactness.
Stop trying to use a hammer as a shovel.
No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don't have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
Why would I even go for a RasPi or equivalent?
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't host something I consider as an essential service on something that isn't constantly powered.
Guess our use cases are way too different to properly compare. 😊
I'm surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.
To me, the RasPi served two purposes:
I would add:
I feel you. I have a used Moxa E2210 for IOs. I prefer not to think how much I paid for that.
I dunno what everyone else is using pis for but for me it's not media centers or servers. The pi has a full gpio header with i2c and spi. I can hook up LCD screens, sensors, servos, etc without much additional components. It's like an Arduino except I get a real file system, network stack, multicore performance.
It's more than just a single board computer it feels like an ultra microcontroller.
I feel like this whole "micro PCs are better than raspis" is coming from the group of people who never really used pis for what they were intended? I don't know. Maybe I'm out to lunch here, I'm not trying to defend the pi because it is definitely a really bad choice for a lot of things but honestly despite all the bad blood they've accrued there still isn't an sbc that can really match it's utility and community support at least that I've seen.
Who is this even written for? What a duh article.
If you want to lab around on the cheap then sure get a mini PC, if you need small form factor to do a sane standalone task get a pi. If you're trying to actually get off the ground in self hosted hardware, build a pc (or a server rig) and don't buy rpi or mini PC: that's not in the article, but it's free advice.
Convenience > performance all day errday so the rpi 5 takes the cake.
To be honest I find x86 stuff to be usually much more convenient, even lower end systems that are not really faster than a RPi5 anymore.
It's convenient until you want to upgrade the distro.