That’s Raspberry Pi, the single-board computer, not raspberry pie, the yummy dessert.
Supply chain issues have made Raspberry Pis very scarce, driving prices sky-high. There are some dealers who still sell at manufacturer’s list price. If and when they get units in stock they sell out in minutes. There’s a nice website at rpilocator.com that can help you find who has PIs in stock, if you’re patient enough. My problem is that according to that site nobody hardly ever seems to get the models that I want. So I went looking for alternatives.
I first tried the Banana Pi. These are in stock but they ship from China so it takes a while to get them. I’ve tried the BPI-M2, BPI-M4, and BPI-M5 boards. Loading an operating system on them was tricky. Each one only works with a specific, customized build of a specific version of Debian or Ubuntu, and that’s usually at least one version behind. The wiki has a “Getting Started” page for each BPI model that tells you what boot image to use. Beyond that, each device had its own quirks. The M5, for example, wouldn’t boot without a display attached. So much for running it as a headless server. I wasn’t satisfied with buggy, back-leveled systems like these.
Next, I tried an ODROID H3 board from hardkernel.com. These quad-core Intel boards are in stock and also ship from China so they too take a while to arrive. They are more expensive as well. The board, the power supply, and the RAM are all sold separately. The board and the power supply can be ordered from hardkernel.com for just under $200, including shipping. The RAM you can buy anywhere, it’s regular laptop memory (DDR4 PC4-23400). Instead of being limited to whatever is soldered onto the board by the manufacturer, you get to put on whatever amount of RAM you want, up to 64GB. Instead of an SD card, on this board the storage options are a slot for an M2 NVMe SSD board, and connectors for two SATA 3 drives. I put 64GB RAM and a 1TB M2 NVMe SSD on my board. With all the bits plugged together, I booted and installed the current Fedora release from a USB key, just like I would any other system. So far everything I’ve tried has worked without any quirks. This makes me very happy.
There is, of course, a huge cost difference between a $75 Raspberry Pi 4 with a $12 SD card and a $350 ODROID system like mine. If you can get a Pi 4, and that’s all you need, great. But I like the ODROID H3 as a low-cost server option. For me, it’s enough of an improvement over a Raspberry Pi that I can tolerate the price. It also works great in my use case, as a BackupPC server, running daily backups of twelve other computers for me onto a 24TB RAID array connected through its USB 3 ports, plus functioning as the backup DHCP and DNS server for my home network.
I designed and 3D-printed a case for it too.
