I have an 8gb Raspberry Pi 4 that has been a workhorse for years. I keep it for my not intense but essential networking purposes, NetBoot.xyz, Homepage, etc., because I can run it over PoE (edit: Power over Ethernet), so it is always on as long as my network is up.

It is growing long in the tooth, and I find myself wanting to replace it with something a bit more capable. Looking at the 8gb Pi 5 at $80 plus another $30 for a PoE hat, I wonder if there is something out there that would be a better value for running PoE? Can you convert a micro pc over to PoE? Does anyone have any recommendations for computers that run off PoE or can be converted to PoE?

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      21·
      8 months ago

      I bought an N100 mini PC (not POE) as my new server a couple months ago. I really like it. That processor is great for power efficiency.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    Personally I am a fan of the soquartz blades

    But I doubt one of those is more powerful than a pi. I run a cluster of them with k3s and distributed nvme storage, but that may not be useful for your particular needs.

    • snekerpimp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      I have three Raspberry Pi 4 4gb and 1 Pi 4 8gb at my disposal, and I still have moments where the thing I need to do will hiccup, or be slower than usual. The Pi 5 has been said to be two times as fast, which is plenty for me. just with the price all in of over $100, curious if anyone else has a better option/opinion

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        What things do you do that hiccup?

        It honestly reallt depends whether your task is hindered by storage speed (sd card), io speed (lan + usb ports), single core speed or lack of threads/cache. It would be good to find out what the limiting resource is, to understand the best upgrade path.

        • snekerpimp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          Webpage loads are slow, especially images, netboot is a bit slow. I’m sure it’s i/o bottleneck and that everything is running in docker containers. I could probably optimize things a bit better, I just don’t have that kind of time for these projects, and getting an old dell micro would be faster than what I have. but they don’t run on PoE+ that I know of.

          • Deckweiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            8 months ago

            I think pi 5 might be pretty good for you.

            If I am not mistaken, they improved the io A LOT in the pi 5.

            Also, you might be able to use the old HAT, at least it worked with pi3 poe hats on pi4.

          • AtariDump@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            8 months ago

            … they don’t run on PoE+…

            They do not; the power requirement is too high. You’re not going to find a computer with a “desktop class” CPU that can be powered via PoE.

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    I would be interested in this as well. The Pi certainly works and I am running one POE. But the Pi can be very limiting.

    If you are converting something, be aware PoE has a power budget of 15w and PoE+ has 30w. Though PoE++ can do 100w, I have not seen many switches with that.