Hello there,
I’ve been running a little army of raspberry pi and libre computer lepotato for many years now.
Sometime died of overheating, one died because the microsd card failed so hard that some kind of electrical shock took off the whole pi.
I’m looking at this trend: replace that with a single or a 2 node cluster of mini pc.
The point is I still want to consume as less electricity as possible. So low TDP CPUs <10 to 15W is my most important criteria, then 2 disk bays (don’t care about the form factor or connector).
Reading buyers comments on Amazon indicates that cheap Chinese mini pc have their ssd dying quickly, or their motherboard, or their power supply, sometimes in months, not even a year.
Would you please recommend a low power mini pc please ? It may be Chinese but from a reputable brand (which I fail to determine).
Im running Aoostar R1 Intel n100 for 3 months now. I bought it barebone. I bought the ram, ssd and hdd seperately. It has 1x m.2 nvme slot and x2 3.5/2.5" disk bay. But i swap the wifi card to another nvme because im not using it.
Intel spec is 6w for n100 but my r1 total wattage is 32w idle including extra usb fan at the top. A bit at the high side after researching around but i dont really mind.
@3aqn5k6ryk Intressting, with nice Mac Pro trashcan vibes 🤭 it is close to what I have in mind, thanks !
Yeah. They released a new black color. It used to be white, it look like a small air purifier.
I’m not here to recommend a NUC (because I don’t know), but a thing about the Pis: I have several, some have been constantly running in some form ore another for 10 years, and I have had 0 issues with overheating or SD-cards. Also I only use the official power supplies.
The Pi 4 and 5 have heating issues, so I added passive cooling to them (if I would do heavy tasks like transcoding I would add active cooling, but that is not my scenario).
They are reliable little machines :-)
(Also they are limited in CPU and memory, so I also have a NUC. It’s an official Intel so not the kind you want ;-) )
I’ve got three different sff desktop units running various apps on them. If you look around you can usually find the tiny form factor business desktops from Dell, HP, and Lenovo used and a few years old for under 100 bucks a piece. The most expensive of the three I bought was a Dell with a 9600t for 90 bucks about a year and a half ago.
Is a secondhand “official” nuc not an option?
I can’t speak to any of the Chinese brands, but minisforum seems well liked.
For what’s worth, your making the right call. I did this a few years back with some second hand nucs, and everything has just been way smoother to deal with on x86