DON’T Use Raspberry Pis for Servers! (Use THIS)

Raspberry Pi’s used to be a great option for self-hosting but sadly they’re just too expensive these days for the average consumer now you could bite the bullet and cough the money but maybe there are better options if you’re looking to run a server on some kind of low-powered

Single board computer don’t skip this video because this guy might look like a pie knockoff but it has a few tricks up its sleeve now what you can skip out on is the line at the grocery store thanks to today’s sponsor hellofresh meal planning sucks which is why my wife and

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Singapore computers like the Raspberry Pi are great for tons of different projects thanks to their various i o and expansive ecosystem of accessories and hats but I’m mostly focusing on using them for self-hosting because of their small size and low power draw they’re awesome for running things like home

Assistant pie hole or really any other service that doesn’t need a ton of horsepower with the continued price hikes of raspberry pies though I wanted to look into Alternatives that might not wreak so much havoc on my wallet or more importantly your wallet so when katus

Reached out to me about taking a look at their vim4 I said well that looks cool but do you have anything more affordable and eventually they’ve sent me this the vim1s obviously this is fairly reminiscent of a Raspberry Pi but it’s quite a bit different For Better or For Worse

Let’s get started with the specs the vim1s is built around the amlogic s905 y4 soc which comes packed with a 2 gigahertz quad-core cortex A35 arm CPU as well as a Mali g31 mp2 GPU that supports decoding for modern codecs like vp9 av1 and h.265 it has 2 gigabytes of

Lpddr4 and supports Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth as you would expect there’s a Micro SD card slot on the bottom but one of the things that sets the vim1s apart from other similar boards is the 16 gigabytes of embedded MMC storage as well as SPI flash storage that contains

Oo a flashing and management tool that I’ll talk more on later another nice feature is the addition of power function and reset buttons on the side of the PCB which can be really handy when you’re tinkering around with this thing on the top of the PCB there is a

Very obvious 40 pin gpio but surprisingly this doesn’t use the same pin out as Raspberry Pi’s which is a pretty big bummer if you were going to try and use this with any of the vast array of accessories that are in the pi ecosystem there are some other

Fun little connections like the VIN 5 volt power input if you’re into Arduino and more maker stuff but that doesn’t really help a ton in the context that I’m working in but they are cool features and might be of interest or value to you on the front you get a USBC

Port for power as well as a full-size HDMI port but that’s kind of where the good news ends in regards to the front i o because all that’s left are these two USB 2.0 ports and a 100 megabit ethernet port this is the part where I wanted to

Just cry a little bit because in a lot of ways this thing is great but that missing 900 megabits of bandwidth really puts some limits on what this thing is capable of but all hope isn’t lost while this might not be great for things like file sharing it could still be a solid

Option for a lot of lighter weight services like home assistant or pie hole or to use for monitoring all of your other servers and services Heck if you’re on a 100 megabit per second or lower internet connection this thing could even run just fine as a VPN server

Now I don’t have a ton of things to compare this to just my Pi 4 and Pi zero and before checking current prices my plan was to sort of position this against the pi 4 but after checking current prices the pi zero is actually the more direct competitor because while

It comes in at a lower cost of only 50 or so at least at the time of filming you need to factor in the price of an SD card for storage as well as a USB to ethernet adapter remember the vim1s has built an emmc storage so you don’t

Necessarily need to buy an SD card to run the operating system now the pi zero definitely has an advantage thanks to its incredibly small size and the massive ecosystem of accessories and such but for just running some server tasks well how well do these two Stack Up

Well first I decided to do a few benchmarks with the vim1s as well as the pies I started off with the CPU Benchmark of sysbinch and with a single thread the pi 4 managed 1780 events per second with the vim1s well behind at just 8.97 but

The pi zero with its single core one gigahertz broadcom CPU only managed 32 events per second when we bump the test up to four threads the pi 4 and vim1s scale fairly well at 7134 and 3584 events per second respectively but the pi zero still came

In at 32 events per second which makes sense being a single core CPU now you might be thinking okay well yeah this makes sense because the pi zero is in a completely different product class it consumes way less power so that makes sense well no the pi zero consumed 1.6

Watts at idle and 2 Watts while running a sustained load the vim1s on the other hand only consumed one and a half Watts at idle and jumped up to 2.2 Watts under a sustained load but you have to keep in mind how much more powerful this CPU is

Meaning when given the same tasks the vim1s is going to be sitting at idle a lot more often the pi 4 consumed quite a bit more here but also performed substantially better so it’s pretty fair I ran Apache bench from one of my other servers to test how well these could

Handle Network requests starting with just a generic nginx hello world Docker container and the pi zero Falls way behind again with only 145 requests per minute compared to the vim1s at over 2600. to give a bit more of a real world example though I decided to install home

Assistant on each of these using the Linux server.io image and then tested the response of the welcome page and here well the pi zero actually couldn’t even run it and this shows a big weakness of the pi zero which is its older V6 version of the arm architecture

It’s not uncommon to come across software that just isn’t compatible with it such as this example here the vim1s however has no issues there and managed 288 requests per minute with the pi 4 at 567. in comparison to its most closely priced Raspberry Pi alternative the vim1s looks

Pretty good so far on paper but benchmarks only tell part of the story so rather than more of those I wanted to put it to use in the real world and this is where I get to talk about probably my favorite thing about the vim1s which is

Ooh first of all super fun to say wow it’s fun right oh wow also it’s stupid also it’s really fun to use when you first boot up the Z1S you’ll land on the u-wow install wizard which lets you download a variety of pre-made images such as Android or

Ubuntu download them into RAM and then install them onto the embedded storage and maybe it was just because I was trying out a lot of different images at the time and also trying to flash the cards for the Raspberry Pi’s but luau just felt really fast and helpful and it

Can do quite a bit like install custom images from a flash drive dump the current image to a flash drive which is super useful update or repair the device firmware and more including some games which I’m really bad at Tetris by the way I landed on the latest available release

Of Ubuntu server and downloaded and installed it with no issues I got Docker up and running and as mentioned earlier ran home assistant I got a bit irritated trying to remember how to get Samba up and running properly as it’s been a while since I’ve done

That on Ubuntu and then realized it was probably easier and more worth it to just see if Casa OS would run on this as I just done a whole tutorial on it I had a feeling I was at least going to run into something Goofy with this being

Arm-based and a little bit of a niche product but no Casa OS installed just fine and it honestly seems like a great fit for something like this you could run a lot of simple services like ad guard home or pie hole and actually one of the cool things that

Stood out to me as a potential use case was unify controller now I don’t actually have any unify stuff so that in particular wouldn’t make sense for me but I actually might use this to run something called omada controller which is sort of tp-link’s version of unify

Controller which would make a lot more sense since I actually own tp-links which is an access points that could be managed by that I also ran uptime Kuma as I think this could be great for monitoring some of your other servers or services in your home lab

I could have done a lot of little things but I sort of wanted to see if I could break this thing so I threw the Minecraft paper server that I’ve used in the past at it and well yeah it wasn’t a great experience after a long time though the world did

Finally load in but I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you’re into some very interesting World designs that being said once the terrain was finally generated it worked decently well so I imagine if someone really wanted to mess around with pre-generating worlds and such you could get this working for a

Small Minecraft server although I don’t know how well that will really work out in the long run who knows now earlier I did mention using this as a VPN I was nervous that tailscale might have some issues installing but once again it went pretty smoothly

I set this up as an exit node in the exact same way I did in my casa OS tutorial which you can check that out if you’re interested and within just a minute or two I had a working tail scale exit node now obviously I was limited a

Bit in terms of bandwidth but 70 to 80 megabits per second isn’t terrible if you’re just using it for a few things especially if you don’t have a very fast internet connection anyway speaking of internet connections I did test out using a USB to ethernet adapter because

Well it’s a lot slower than USB 3 USB 2 should still be at least three times or so faster than the 100 megabit per second port and that turned out to be the case when testing some file transfers so you could sacrifice a bit of stability for slightly better

Networking speeds if you want I also did a quick read speed Benchmark on the emmc and SD card storage using HD parm to see how much better the internal storage was compared to an SD card and at least when reading from Storage the emmc is quite a bit faster than my SanDisk something

It’s a decent SD card I can’t remember the exact specs I should know now I’ll be honest I’m not really into Kodi and coralec and such but I did spin up the m image of Android TV that was available in new WoW as I saw it was fairly recent

At first things seemed to be buttery smooth as the minis looked good and YouTube playback was great but it seems like there might be a few bugs that need to be worked out first of all I couldn’t get casting to work which is a huge bummer because I was sort of hoping I

Could maybe use this to replace one of our old chromecasts but that might not be the case for now or ever I actually bought a remote that Kata sells for only like five bucks and well yeah that price sounds about right because it worked some of the time sort of yeah I don’t

Really know there was just a lot of times where button presses didn’t seem to register at all and I I can’t quite tell if it’s an IR issue or a remote issue or a software issue but yeah also while some video playback was clearly taking advantage of the Mali GPU other

Apps were not at least not correctly this slideshow here is supposed to be the HBO TV static intro at a nice cinematic two seconds per frame or so I really hope some of these issues get worked out somehow and I’m not even entirely sure where the fault lies and

Who might be able to fix them but I hope it happens because this could be a cool little media player I have seemed to hear good things generally from other YouTubers that have covered this from more of a media player or emulator approach so maybe go check those videos

Out if that type of stuff interests you but for using it as a server the vim1s seems like a good deal when comparing it to its Raspberry Pi cousins but what about all the other single board computers out there well I’m not really familiar with everything that’s available these days

But I did do a little bit of looking around for a better deal and ended up coming across this the Libra computer a uh I don’t know the the late potato is what it seems to go by specs wise it’s not quite as powerful as the m1s and

Also doesn’t have USB 3 or gigabit Ethernet but comes in at just over half the price so if all you’re wanting is bare minimum Computing at a low cost and low power draw is this the better deal well I wanted to know so I bought one

Clearly and I did all of the same tests that I did with the other boards and well the vim1s sort of held up here the lay potato had respectable results in sysbinch as well as Apache bench that definitely was a performance tier below the vim1s and while a few tenths of a

Watt isn’t much the vimwood S did manage to outperform while also consuming slightly less power so that is a bit of a win there realistically though the difference in efficiency is negligible and things like oh wow emmc storage and even the built-in power buttons would factor into my decision more than a

Fraction of a watt so the vim1s is a solid performer with really good efficiency and some nice features the embedded storage and uwow are honestly super helpful and easy to use keeping you from having to pop SD cards in and out all of the time while you’re trying

Different things out plus the support for decoding modern video codecs like av1 Plus the full-size HDMI port could be great if you ever end up using it in the future as a media player however the lack of gigabit Ethernet and faster USB is a big bummer and really limits some

Of the awesome things you could do with something like this also why not use the Raspberry Pi gpio it doesn’t make sense to me it’s I don’t know if you’re just looking for something really inexpensive to run some simple services on and you don’t care about having some of the nicer features

That the vim1s offers maybe look into something like the Libre computer like potato huge thanks to katus for sending this board over and if you’re interested in any of the boards that I talked about including this one obviously I’ll have links in the description where you can

Go find them and support the hardware Haven Channel and if you like this video make sure and give it a like as that really goes a long way and maybe consider subscribing if you want to see more videos like this also don’t forget to go to hellofresh.com and use code Hardware

Haven 16 for 16 free meals plus free shipping that’s about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really can’t wait to see you in the next one