We can already attach SSD’s though you need a good power supply. I just found this, even better though it is pi5 only
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Nice. My pi5 finally arrived on the US Pacific Northwest on Thursday and it is ‘very’ snappy.
I’m seeing it as more than twice the pi4 in performance in some simple measures and it’s surprisingly measuring faster than my old ubuntu 2012 i5 Macbook Air. I did buy the ‘active cooler’ and official case and power supply as well from the US PiShop.
Here’s a temperature comparison. The old modelB is in a clear plastic case with no airflow. The pi3 and pi4 are in FLIRC cases in a closed piece of furniture with no airflow. The pi5 is in the official case in a 70 degF room, but I have the case lid ‘on’ loosely. That’s enough so that you can’t hear the fan lightly spinning.
I’ll run a similar comparison with the case off for a day and see if there are significant differences.
PI’s are nice but once you get all the “accessories” for them to run you end up spending more that the newer Mini PC’s. I used to have 4 pi’s running to run WeeWx and other functions on my network and replaced all 4 with BeeLInk’s EQ series mini PC. What is great there is enough headroom on the mini PC to run a virtualization environment and create VM’s and Containers. I actually purchased two of them since the prices were low back in May on Amazon and have full redundancy. So if one goes offline the WeeWx container will start on the second box and continue running with almost no data loss.
I still use the PI’s for robot controllers for the high school robotics club because they do have great GPIO support.
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FWIW - my pi5 setup was under $90 end-to-end before tax+shipping. Add in the SD card value and call it $100 US. Adding a SSD gets you to perhaps $125 US. Not bad for a whole lot of performance in a tiny low-power footprint.
I would doubt a BeeLink can match a pi5 level of price/performance ‘unless’ you need to run VMs, which pushes you to x86_64 of course.
That said - I’d be interested in your precise BeeLink model and setup to compare costs etc.
Lastly since you’re a weewx guy - it would be great if you could spare a few minutes to run the weewx performance test (link) to add to the list of benchmarked gear there. Should take maybe 15 minutes end-to-end to install/run/uninstall things.
(update - my bash script to run the benchmark is (here) if you are interested…)
my Beelink is the EQ Series 12 Generation:
CPU: Intel Alder Lake N100
Memory: 16 GB
Storage: 500GB
Network: Wifi 6, 2 x 2.5GB Intel Ethernet
Right now I run a configured container LXC as Debian Bullseye with Proxmox, I first setup as a minimal config as needed. Still running version 4.10 of weexw from the Debian repo.
2 CPU
1 GB RAM
16 GB Storage
I ran your test twice:
2023-11-18T15:10:27.756033-06:00 lprtest wee_reports[1225] INFO weewx.cheetahgenerator: Generated 8 files for report SeasonsReport in 0.51 seconds
2023-11-18T15:10:27.946040-06:00 lprtest wee_reports[1225] INFO weewx.imagegenerator: Generated 17 images for report SeasonsReport in 0.18 seconds
2023-11-18T15:14:08.647356-06:00 lprtest wee_reports[1303] INFO weewx.cheetahgenerator: Generated 8 files for report SeasonsReport in 0.51 seconds
2023-11-18T15:14:08.830629-06:00 lprtest wee_reports[1303] INFO weewx.imagegenerator: Generated 17 images for report SeasonsReport in 0.17 seconds
as for the system info that doesn’t work well in containers:
dpkg --print-architecture
amd64
uname -a
Linux lprtest 6.2.16-19-pve #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC PMX 6.2.16-19 (2023-10-24T12:07Z) x86_64 GNU/Linux
It looks like someone already did some cost comparisons, but I wouldn’t take their report as accurate since they didn’t seem to run good benchmarks.
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Hmmm, you probably need to just run the script natively on your host assuming it’s a real Linux. I only fiddled with proxmox a little a while back that was enough to know that I didn’t like it. More of a bare os cli guy here. You should see 21 files and 68 images created.
If you look at the script you’ll see it only makes a couple directories in /var/tmp and runs there, so it does not mess with your host os at all. Cleanup is just deleting the two /var/tmp dirs it tells you about.
(I just updated the script - found a typo related to cleaning up prior runs. That’s why you saw different quantity of files+images. Current script is at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vinceskahan/weewx-odds-and-ends/master/weetest.sh)
There are so many factual errors in that PBX Science article as well as statements of fact with zero data supporting their ‘facts’ that to me it’s gotta be a fake comparison that’s either AI generated or idiot generated. Regardless - that BeeLink for $139 on Amazon (today) vs. about $100-125 for a comparable pi5 setup is a nice price point. Thanks for the link. Once you decide to cross the $75 or so barrier a small PC is worth thinking about. I just can’t keep all the models and chipsets straight any more.
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