I have been using my Raspberry pi 4 for the past 2 years to self-host many of my services. Now i think its time to upgrade to a new improvised server.
Why Upgrade from Raspberry Pi 4?
- So why am i upgrading from my Raspberrypi 4 4gb ram to a new system? Its mostly because the pi runs on ARM architecture which is a big limitation currently. Still out there are a lot of projects which are made for x86 CPU. It will take time to migrate from x86 to arm. I dont think i have time untill that change is made.
- Also this pi is limited of Memory. Just 4gb of ram isnt enough for running a lot of services only for my self. Event this blog youre reading was once hosted on my pi now its been moded to a good server. Also media server needs some extra memory for the good performance which was not possible in that pi buffering everytime for one user also.
- The CPU was not powerfull enough for all my calculations. When idle the power efficiency was there but when under load this machine doesnt have enough power for all the computations required. Very slow 🙂
- The main part is reliability. If the boot disk fails there is no way to recover it unless i take backups weekly. Which was a big pain in the a$$.
- Proxmox – Also installing proxmox in this system was hard and it was not much of supporting currently. I wanted to install and manage multiple VMs for all my work and isolate them from earchother which was a limiting faction in this pi.
Why Intel N100 Mini PC?
So why did i choose this n100 mini pc by GMKtec?
- So mainly because of its memory support and upgradability. As per intels recommendation n100 supports 16GB of ram but after multiple people tested it out 32GB works fine. So memory will never be a limit for me in this server.
- Also all intel based CPUs are good at transcoding video which will have a good performance when i install jellyfin server later and without a hastle it will work fine and handle multiple users.
- This CPU is one of the few CPU just sips 6W at idle power. This is the best as most of the time my server is going to be sitting idle and it wont even affect my electricity bill.
- It has dual storage slots. one m.2 and sata ports. This helps me to put the two ssd on zfs mirror so that redundancy is maintained. Whenever one disk fails the other disk has the data. I dont have to worry about disk failing and backing up the data weekly.
- It is a huge upgrade in terms of CPU power and memory capacity and everything is an upgrade.
Also in india there are a very few sellers out there selling n100 mini pc. And i came across this one by skullsaints but they were selling some things imported from cheap chinese products and also some sources in reddit mentioned about no good custinercare after sales. This also have to worry about bios updates. But i came across a seller who imports the GMKtec one and i bought it in that day.
In later posts ill speak about the setting up of all the services and settings of my device.