No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don’t have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
Why would I even go for a RasPi or equivalent?
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yawn.
A mini/micro is 20x the volume of a Pi.
Use-case matters, I use an SFF as a file server and media player, and a Pi for PiHole, Tailscale, etc.
I’ve also setup a Pi as a dash cam with wifi so it auto uploads when I get home. Can’t see using an SFF/Mini/Micro the same way.
Yes, the Pi costs more per MFLOP or whatever performance metric you want to use, but it excels in compactness.
Stop trying to use a hammer as a shovel.