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Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
276 points transpute | 6 comments | 04 Jul 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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poulpy123 ◴[04 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44464387[source]▶
This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).

But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.

Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.

At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.

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1. p_ing ◴[04 Jul 25 14:07 UTC] No.44464711[source]▶
If you want something less "risky", ASRock Industrial has mini PCs which are great. I have an AliExpress N150, fully passive which worked just fine but then I saw the shiny of the Arrow Lake-H platform. Ended up getting a NUC BOX-225H for Opnsense. Way overkill, it's great!

https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/industrial-computer-system

The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC + plenty of NVMe drives.

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2. enronmusk ◴[04 Jul 25 14:56 UTC] No.44465116[source]▶
That's $550 on amazon/newegg. It's not in the same price range at all.
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3. p_ing ◴[04 Jul 25 15:08 UTC] No.44465214[source]▶
Oh, my bad, I don't recall mentioning price in my post. Rather I mentioned a system that has the PCIe lanes to accomidate 2.5G NICs + 4 NVMe drives without compromises.
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4. akho ◴[04 Jul 25 16:33 UTC] No.44465907{3}[source]▶
For the price, you can get four N150, with 36 lanes. It's a pointless comparison.
5. wokkel ◴[04 Jul 25 19:35 UTC] No.44467247{3}[source]▶
Use an odroid h4: 2x2.5gbe and a 4*1 m.2 bifurcation card to get 4 nvme drives there. Performance is limited due to ethernet anyway.
6. moondev ◴[05 Jul 25 10:47 UTC] No.44471762[source]▶
I have several asrockrack mobos and this is the first time I am hearing of asrockind, very interesting and there are a TON of different models here

Do any of these asrockind machines have a BMC?

I just got a minisforum s100, it's 4c8g n100 and POE which is pretty sweet. If only it had Intel vpro or some sort of BMC it would be perfect. I can attach a pikvm but looks like I need to do surgery on it to interface with the power switch. WakeOnLan has been really unreliable in my tests so far.