Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.

View on HN

> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.

It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).

But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.

I’m a long time user of raspberry pis for various tinkering projects. I think the GPIO and camera interface are important, but also the size. The pi zero I would consider to be generally the most functional format of the pis.

Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.

There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.

These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).

> But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis.

Feelings over facts, at least you acknowledge it.

The success of (and the issues with) the raspberry pi mainly derive from it being mistaken for a good home-server platform. It's not, it's awful for that use case. For pretending it to be an embedded systems platform (either for prototyping or to later target the compute modules for production usage) sure, it's great.

It's all fine as long as the (computing) needs are low and budget is not an issue.

>> It's not, it's awful for that use case.

The problem, imho, is that it's amazing right up to a point where it isn't. It's tiny, noiseless, sips power....while providing what you need it to. Until one day the service you set up is not available anymore, the Pi isn't responding on the network, and then you check and the microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone. Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.

> Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.

You can get that from any homelab setup though. Personally, I long since went the route of regularly setting up my Pis from scratch using Ansible - that way I at least know that I didn't forget to commit any manual changes made.

Pi-specific, my recommendation is to have a serious power supply. For the old Pis with Micro USB, Meanwell makes good ones, link that with a good wire gauge (18 AWG or more) and off you go. New Pis with USB-C, Anker power supply and a decent USB-C cable... that solves a lot of microSD corruption issues because the power regulation to the card isn't that good and just passes through brownouts/undervoltage conditions.

And the second recommendation, use "industrial" microSD cards, preferably those that are SLC. Grab them from Mouser, yes they are a bit more expensive than "normal" microSD cards but will live so much longer.

[1] https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDQED-008G-XI

> microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone

Unlike Intel servers, where corruption of the boot media is of course of no consequences.

I didn't say that. It's just a reply based on my personal experience - I've set up probably 10-12 raspberry pis around my home for various projects, they all died due to SD corruption within a year. My intel-based NAS has worked fine for 8 years with no issues, then I finally replaced it with a newer one, that's now been running for 6 years. Obviously, anecdotes, the intel server is a lot more expensive, yes yes yes. But like OP said, Pis are not a great choice for anything like a home server because they aren't very reliable(imho) - maybe that works for your usecase, or maybe for most peoples usecases. I'm personally steering away from them except for some hobby tinkering.

I'd say that to painlessly use Raspberry Pi, one has to be aware of the glaring shortcomings of SD cards as root storage.

> It's not, it's awful for that use case

I'd be inclined to slightly agree with you on Raspberry Pi 4 and older, but the 5 is a whole lot different beast with a leap forward in performance.

I would be curious to see if some qualcomm/snapdragon mini PCs could embrace the tinker-ability and power consumption approach and add some nice competition there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com