(Photo: pixabay.com)

Project "Mini-Server": Raspberry Pi 4 & SSD

The goal of this project is to set up an inexpensive yet powerful mini-server. For this purpose a Raspberry Pi 4 is combined with a fast SSD. For more performance and higher reliability, more of these mini servers will be set up.

... By Markus Fleschutz 🕓 March 11, 2021

Hardware used

• Board: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with Cortex A72 CPU (4 cores á 1.5 GHz) and 4 GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM. ** Case: MANOUII aluminum case without fan (€18,99)
• SD-Card: 32 GB, Class 10 (only used for booting the operating system)
• SSD: Samsung EVO SATA 512 GB (needs no additional power cable and no fan) USB 3.0 to SATA adapter: to connect the board to the SSD (€8,99) USB-C power supply: 5V, 3A, 15W

Software used

• Operating system: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server Edition for ARM64
• Packages: powershell, smartmontools, samba (general), gcc, clang, clang-tidy, distcc, ninja-build (for software development)
• Snaps: bashtop, htop, hw-probe (general), ant, ccache, cmake, cppcheck, go, groovy, python38 (for software development), adguard-home (as DNS server with ad blocker), ipfs (as IPFS server), plexmediaserver (as media server) and minidlna-escoand (as DLNA server)

Measurements & Data

• Current consumption: 7.5 watts (including SSD) in idle mode
• Dimensions: 12 x 7 x 5 cm total (L x W x H), corresponds to 420 cc
• Purchase price: circa 150 € total (as of 2019).
• Stability: runs stable since June 1, 2020, even under full load.
• Loudness: 0 dB (fanless)
• CPU temperature: from 41 °C (idle) to 62 °C (full load), measured at room temperature 20 °C.
• Linpack Benchmark: 13.5 GFLOPS, 925 MIPS single-precision, 748 MIPS double-precision, 2037 MIPS single-precision using NEON instructions
• Gigabit Ethernet: 117 MB/s throughput, ping min/average/max/mdev = 0.173/0.241/0.302/0.029 ms
• USB 3.0: 363 MB/s read throughput, 323 MB/s write throughput
• MicroSD: 46 MB/s read throughput, 27 MB/s write throughput
• Efficiency: 1.8 GFLOPS per Watt

Conclusion

👍 Thumbs up for stability, energy consumption, total cost of ownership and efficiency.

👍 The Raspberry Pi 4 is also available in a version with 8 GB RAM - ideal for servers

👍 The Raspberry Pi 4 also supports booting via the USB interface, so no slow and failure-prone SD card is needed anymore

👌 Perfect would be Power over Ethernet (PoE), then also the separate power supply would be omitted

👎 Not all software packages and snap packages are available for ARM64 yet, Ubuntu should improve here

👎 For an encrypted user directory, the Raspberry Pi is (still) too weak

Links

• raspberrypi.org - the Raspberry Pi homepage
• wikipedia.org - everything about the Raspberry Pi
• ubuntu.com - the Ubuntu homepage
• snapcraft.io/store - the Snap Store