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).

  • seang96A
    1·
    6 hours ago

    For clusters you generally want an odd count (3 instead of 2).

    Intel NUCs are awesome and have 3 year warranties. Unfortunately Asus has NUC brand now and handles even the Intel branded ones warranties. That said, I did do an RMA on one of my units and it wasn’t great but not the worst experience.

  • stargazingpenguin@lemmy.zip
    2·
    8 hours ago

    I know someone that has a Beelink mini PC and is happy with it, and I’ve heard some good things elsewhere too. I’m probably going to get one once my current Lenovo mini goes bad on me. They have some sub-$200 USD options that I think can fit two m.2 SSDs in them.

  • RagingToad@feddit.nl
    2·
    12 hours ago

    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 ;-) )

    • m33@theprancingpony.inOP
      1·
      12 hours ago

      @RagingToad The microsd that killed one of my Pi (a Pi3) didn’t overheat, it just literally exploded, one face of the plastic case was split in two. My conclusion is that i was creating a short circuit, and damaged the Pi board.

      Before I got cooling right, two Pi were really overheating, one died (actually it boots, but freeze). Then I started using radiators or metal cases using the whole case as a dissipator. And a slow fan on top of that for Pi4 and Pi5.

      I would totally look at a NUC by Intel, I’m not restricted to Chinese mini pc at all. Actually I’m looking at Intel NUC but they are like twice the price of other mini pc… so I’m still investigating.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
    2·
    16 hours 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