Hi, guys
I've been using Raspberry PI 3 at home for small self-hosted installations and I have had both positive and negative experience.
Positive
I bought 3 PIs and that allowed me to run a small home DNS server and DB server on one without any problems. I was able to scale hardware at very low cost and not worry about proper Jail management or running VMs. Hardware is cheap enough to just roll another.
Completely silent operation and very low power consumption even as I introduce more hardware.
Negative
Web server on another one has been rigged with issues related to SD Card IO failures. I had to restored it at least 3 times. I replaced SD Card and saw yet another IO error this time on my external HD drives running BTRFS.
In short: Linux stability is an issue.
Old Server as an Alternative
At some point I bought an awesome old dell server for $300 with a couple drives. It came with a couple troublemakers: huge noise and a heater for the room. So, I stopped running it for those 2 reasons.
FreeBSD has never failed me and has not been an IO troublemaker except for some hardware failure cases. Linux has been reporting IO errors on work VM servers and at home.
Back to Low Cost Hardware Search
So, I like the low cost model of PI hardware, its low power and zero noise. I don't like 1GB of RAM limitation, but I can live with it. I'd love to get a PI like hardware that is well supported on FreeBSD. I don't quite care if it is ARM or Intel. I understand that cost might be a bit higher than PI's cost.
I wish I could run FreeBSD on Raspberry PI 3. Unfortunately, it is not as well supported and I don't feel that I can run it safely. May be I am wrong in assessing FreeBSD on PI and that's the route to take.
So, if you could reply with good Intel based alternatives that can run on FreeBSD well, stay low cost and be not noisy I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you
I've been using Raspberry PI 3 at home for small self-hosted installations and I have had both positive and negative experience.
Positive
I bought 3 PIs and that allowed me to run a small home DNS server and DB server on one without any problems. I was able to scale hardware at very low cost and not worry about proper Jail management or running VMs. Hardware is cheap enough to just roll another.
Completely silent operation and very low power consumption even as I introduce more hardware.
Negative
Web server on another one has been rigged with issues related to SD Card IO failures. I had to restored it at least 3 times. I replaced SD Card and saw yet another IO error this time on my external HD drives running BTRFS.
In short: Linux stability is an issue.
Old Server as an Alternative
At some point I bought an awesome old dell server for $300 with a couple drives. It came with a couple troublemakers: huge noise and a heater for the room. So, I stopped running it for those 2 reasons.
FreeBSD has never failed me and has not been an IO troublemaker except for some hardware failure cases. Linux has been reporting IO errors on work VM servers and at home.
Back to Low Cost Hardware Search
So, I like the low cost model of PI hardware, its low power and zero noise. I don't like 1GB of RAM limitation, but I can live with it. I'd love to get a PI like hardware that is well supported on FreeBSD. I don't quite care if it is ARM or Intel. I understand that cost might be a bit higher than PI's cost.
I wish I could run FreeBSD on Raspberry PI 3. Unfortunately, it is not as well supported and I don't feel that I can run it safely. May be I am wrong in assessing FreeBSD on PI and that's the route to take.
So, if you could reply with good Intel based alternatives that can run on FreeBSD well, stay low cost and be not noisy I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you