# Low cost Intel Hardware or Raspberry PI like solution on Intel



## sergeig (May 31, 2018)

Hi, guys

I've been using Raspberry PI 3 at home for small self-hosted installations and I have had both positive and negative experience.

*Positive*

I bought 3 PIs and that allowed me to run a small home DNS server and DB server on one without any problems.  I was able to scale hardware at very low cost and not worry about proper Jail management or running VMs. Hardware is cheap enough to just roll another.

Completely silent operation and very low power consumption even as I introduce more hardware.

*Negative*

Web server on another one has been rigged with issues related to SD Card IO failures.  I had to restored it at least 3 times.  I replaced SD Card and saw yet another IO error this time on my external HD drives running BTRFS.

In short: Linux stability is an issue.

*Old Server as an Alternative*

At some point I bought an awesome old dell server for $300 with a couple drives.  It came with a couple troublemakers:  huge noise and a heater for the room.  So, I stopped running it for those 2 reasons.

FreeBSD has never failed me and has not been an IO troublemaker except for some hardware failure cases.  Linux has been reporting IO errors on work VM servers and at home.

*Back to Low Cost Hardware Search*

So, I like the low cost model of PI hardware, its low power and zero noise.  I don't like 1GB of RAM limitation, but I can live with it.  I'd love to get a PI like hardware that is well supported on FreeBSD.  I don't quite care if it is ARM or Intel.  I understand that cost might be a bit higher than PI's cost.

I wish I could run FreeBSD on Raspberry PI 3.  Unfortunately, it is not as well supported and I don't feel that I can run it safely.  May be I am wrong in assessing FreeBSD on PI and that's the route to take.

So, if you could reply with good Intel based alternatives that can run on FreeBSD well, stay low cost and be not noisy I would greatly appreciate it.


Thank you


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## k.jacker (Jun 8, 2018)

I allways like to recommend Intel socket 1150 (Haswell generation).
A motherboard with H81 chipset and a Celeron G1820 are as cheap as it can get, while this combo beats most of Intel's SoC solutions in performance and low power consumption (around 13W idle).
The Celeron produces very little heat, so it can be run without a fan, with most coolers (havn't tried that with Intel's boxed cooler though).
You need a psu. The Pico-PSUs are nice, fanless and they keep the power consumption and heat low. They won't cost your shirt either 
You pay more then for a Raspi, but you get a much better memory, network and harddrive subsystem, that's fully worth it IMO.


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## JAW (Jun 8, 2018)

I've got my eye on the Rock64, probably going to give one of those a go with FreeBSD next couple of weeks!


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## Kumo Isao (Jun 8, 2018)

How about mini itx j4105? mobo + cpu cost about 75 bucks. Drives wise, you can buy backplanes for old servers and use low end raid card flashed to IT mode.


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## trev (Jun 9, 2018)

I've used a Rpi B and Rpi2 on and off but find sdcard i/o and USB memory stick i/o more limiting than the RAM - a simple `find` over the entire file system can lockup a Pi for hours.

I've had a lot more success with old Apple Mac Minis. Much more memory. No disk i/o issues. Small footprint. Silent. Intel processors. Low power (Idle - 2009 14W; 2010 10W; 2011-2012 11W; 2014 6W). Only downside is the FreeBSD support for the inbuilt Broadcom wireless ... the 2009 BCM4321 now works - it only took 9 years .


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## Deleted member 54719 (Jun 9, 2018)

The PI platform is wholey unsuitable for running enterprise services or for mission critical embedded applications.  I highly discourage using it as anything other than a learning or hobbyist toy.


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## mark_j (Jun 9, 2018)

sergeig said:


> ...
> *Negative*
> 
> Web server on another one has been rigged with issues related to SD Card IO failures.  I had to restored it at least 3 times.  I replaced SD Card and saw yet another IO error this time on my external HD drives running BTRFS.
> ...



I will offer a counter-argument. I've been running RasPi 1/2 and now 3 since their relative inception. My current Pi3 runs a web server (lighttpd), a weather station collater/Arduino feed, a dovecot & postfix server storing all our mail (IMAP to gmail etc), MariaDB and Samba. I have 3 attached USB drives. All the main apps listed here run off the SD Card (Sandisk Extreme 64GB). It also runs deluged (though torrents are few & far between they do smash an SD Card so output goes to a USB). 

I ran Archlinux previously but dumped that because it caused file I/O issues AND it used that abomination known as systemd, and moved to Devuan (non-systemd!) and just upgraded to Ascii. I am currently looking at FreeBSD on the Pi2 to see if it has progressed from a few years ago when it was next to useless.

I also use it for development on the armv7 platform, so it gets plenty of compiles (admittedly used gcc rather than clang - something I hope to address soon) and cmakes.



sergeig said:


> *Back to Low Cost Hardware Search*
> 
> So, I like the low cost model of PI hardware, its low power and zero noise.  I don't like 1GB of RAM limitation, but I can live with it.  I'd love to get a PI like hardware that is well supported on FreeBSD.  I don't quite care if it is ARM or Intel.  I understand that cost might be a bit higher than PI's cost.



We use a Cubox i4-Pro as a media centre with tvheadend as the TV recorder. It is NOT good at playing back HD recorded video (.ts stream) but SD is fine. It will playback compressed .mkv/.mpg of HD video fine.
It's silent, has eSata, etc.

Again, unfortunately a few years ago when looking at an OS for it, freebsd was unsuitable. So, it has Xbian running btrfs (can be high maintenance) and 1 USB stick, 1 USB TV dongle. It also does GB networking (but truly only 450Mb because of shared bus with USB) but it is still faster than any Pi.

Like you I'd love to run *BSD but last time I looked they just didn't cut it.


sergeig said:


> I wish I could run FreeBSD on Raspberry PI 3.  Unfortunately, it is not as well supported and I don't feel that I can run it safely.  May be I am wrong in assessing FreeBSD on PI and that's the route to take.
> 
> So, if you could reply with good Intel based alternatives that can run on FreeBSD well, stay low cost and be not noisy I would greatly appreciate it.
> 
> ...



The only one I can think of is the Udoo X86 systems - though if you go for anything but the Celeron you will need a fan and they're not real quiet. The problem is cost is a subjective thing. We use these devices because they are power-misers and quiet.


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## mark_j (Jun 9, 2018)

tempest766 said:


> The PI platform is wholey unsuitable for running enterprise services or for mission critical embedded applications.  I highly discourage using it as anything other than a learning or hobbyist toy.


Really? What enterprise services was he mentioning? Running a local DNS is hardly enterprise. In fact in our business I used a RPI3 as the DNS and Squid. That's hardly enterprise.
You probably need to try using them before making blanket statements. Sure they have massive limitations but you'd be surprised what they can accomplish.


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## mark_j (Jun 9, 2018)

trev said:


> I've used a Rpi B and Rpi2 on and off but find sdcard i/o and USB memory stick i/o more limiting than the RAM - a simple `find` over the entire file system can lockup a Pi for hours.
> 
> .



Really?
Raspberry Pi3 -
Linux rpi3 4.6.3-gb48d47a #1 SMP Thu Oct 13 00:34:22 CEST 2016 aarch64 GNU/Linux
Devuan GNU/Linux ascii


```
root@rpi3:/home/mark# time find / > rep
find: '/proc/1967/task/1967/net': Invalid argument
find: '/proc/1967/net': Invalid argument

real    0m17.973s
user    0m1.672s
sys     0m4.892s
root@rpi3:/home/mark# wc -l rep
303140 rep
root@rpi3:/home/mark#
```

That's under 20 seconds for 303K files on an SD card. Not too shabby.

Now, cached:

```
oot@rpi3:/home/mark# time find / > rep
find: '/proc/1967/task/1967/net': Invalid argument
find: '/proc/1967/net': Invalid argument

real    0m6.733s
user    0m1.488s
sys     0m2.832s
root@rpi3:/home/mark#
```

Here's a VM:
FreeBSD mark.ghostbsd-pc.home 11.1-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p10 #0: Tue May  8 05:21:56 UTC 2018     root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64


```
oot@mark:/home/mark # time find / > rep
find: /usr/home/mark/.gvfs: Operation not permitted
wc -l rep
0.084u 4.000s 0:26.19 15.5%    67+177k 21061+155io 0pf+0w
root@mark:/home/mark # wc -l rep
  297870 rep
```

Run it a second time to pick up caching:


```
oot@mark:/home/mark # time find / > rep
find: /usr/home/mark/.gvfs: Operation not permitted
0.048u 1.200s 0:01.29 96.1%    68+172k 0+154io 0pf+0
```

So initially it was slower than the Pi3...


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## Phishfry (Jun 9, 2018)

I always had trouble with microSD cards until I found a good embedded card. Apacer really makes the best I have found so far,
Not a camera chip but a genuine embedded device.
http://industrial.apacer.com/en-ww/SSD-Card/SD


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## Deleted member 54719 (Jun 9, 2018)

mark_j said:


> Really? What enterprise services was he mentioning? Running a local DNS is hardly enterprise. In fact in our business I used a RPI3 as the DNS and Squid. That's hardly enterprise.
> You probably need to try using them before making blanket statements. Sure they have massive limitations but you'd be surprised what they can accomplish.



[_rolls eyes and chuckles]_  Don't get me wrong.  The pi is a wonderful learning tool and hobbyist platform, but I would seriously question the competence of any senior level engineer who recommended it as a platform for mission critical embedded work.  Managers love it because it's cheap and most of them ignore reliability or long term cost issues.  Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about it.  You roll the dice and take your chances.


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## mark_j (Jun 17, 2018)

tempest766 said:


> [_rolls eyes and chuckles]_  Don't get me wrong.  The pi is a wonderful learning tool and hobbyist platform, but I would seriously question the competence of any senior level engineer who recommended it as a platform for mission critical embedded work.  Managers love it because it's cheap and most of them ignore reliability or long term cost issues.  Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about it.  You roll the dice and take your chances.



I am puzzled why you draw the conclusion between the OP wanting information on a personal RPI and enterprise platform? I think you're totally off track with this discussion, it's about using a PI to host DNS and a DB, which is what many thousands of people do around the world on a RPI. Don't believe me, go check out their official forums. It has nothing to do with "mission critical", *nothing whatsover*. So I suspect your demeanour about rolling your eyes is a misplaced air of superiority.


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