Member OP
I have assembled a "cloud" from four Raspberry Pi 4 units, 8GB each, running k3s. Total draw under 30W. Article 13 flashbacks aside, this is my GDPR-compliant, EU-sovereign compute at home.
Performance is... theoretical. Running Nextcloud and a few containers. I am proud but also realistic. Anyone else doing this? What workloads actually work?
4x Pi4, 8GB each, you're looking at maybe 15W idle per unit with active cooling, 60W total under load. For that draw you could run a single N100 mini-PC with actual x86 performance and NVMe.
Pi clusters are fun projects but the performance per watt vs actual work done is poor. I've shipped pallets of actual 1U servers that draw less per core.
Yeah nah that's a sweet as project but what are you actually running on it? I tried same thing, chur for the effort but my plex transcoded at 0.2x speed?
Just use it for dns and pihole maybe? Otherwise you're gonna have a bad time
Member
The sd cards are the weak point mate. I bought 4x 128gb for $8 each from some ali store and one died in a week. Now I use usb ssd but that defeats the $ savings.
Im running same setup, 4 pi4 from CloudCone refurbs $35 each. Total cost $140 plus sd cards. Definitely not fast but it works for my static sites
1. Pi cluster reality checks
A) pros:
I) low power
Ii) silent
Iii) learning experience
B) cons:
I) sd card corruption risk
Ii) arm compatibility issues
Iii) actual performance per dollar
2. Better alternatives
A) used small form factor pc
B) single mini pc with nvme
3. My setup
A) 3x pi3b+ retired 2023
B) now: one optiplex, $80, never looked back
Wesh brusselsdzire1, le cluster حلو for learning mais for production... incha'allah the sd cards hold
I had same setup, le power supply was cheap garbage ; lost two cards in one week. Now I use proper poe hat and samsung cards only
