| The Raspberry Pi is a super powerful mini-computer and we all know that for years now. It can perform various activities with a great deal of success. In fact, what we should know is that it is a perfect device to set up as a mini server with various services. Here are the reasons why this cute credit-card sized computer can be the base of your next server. |  |
1. Power consumption - The Pi consumes around five to seven watts of electricity. This is just one tenth of what bigger sized box would use. As the servers run constantly night and day, the electrical savings are great. On an average the cost of a basic Pi kit (Pi board, case, and power supply) will recover its cost with a year's worth in electricity savings provided it’s left running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
2. Nil moving parts - The Pi utilizes an SD card for storage. This makes it fast with no moving parts. It does not have fans and other things. A Class 10 SD card is generally the best in performance as compared to lower class cards, but this will only affect boot time where there is the most I/O.
<>3. Small form factor – You can hold the Pi (with a case) in your hand whereas a full-sized box cannot. This implies that Pi can be integrated inside of devices as well.
4. Nil noise - The Pi is silent.
5. Status lights - There are many status lights on Pi's motherboard. You can clearly see NIC activity, disk I/O, power status, etc.
6. Expansion capabilities - There are a number of devices available for the Pi at affordable prices. Right from an I/O board (GPIO) to a camera. It has two USB ports, however if you hook up a powered USB hub, more devices can be added.
7. Built-in HDMI capable graphics - The display port on the Pi is HDMI handling resolutions of up to 1920×1200. It has a few converters which can convert to VGA for backwards compatibility.
8. Affordability – In comparison to other similar options, the Pi (revision B) provides the best specs for the price. It is among the few devices that offers 512 MB of RAM. There has been a reduction in price since it first came about and is finally affordable as a hobby, business use, or any other need.
9. Huge community support - The Pi offers phenomenal community support. Support can be gained quite readily for the hardware and/or GNU/Linux software running on the Pi primarily in user forums, based on the GNU/Linux distribution used.
10. Overclocking capability - The Pi can be overclocked in case there are performance issues with the application it uses, however it is at the user's risk to do this.
11. Varied uses - Getting the storage on an SD card enables it to be easily swapped with other SD cards running other GNU/Linux distributions to quickly and easily change the functionality of the Pi.
With pros, there are some cons that come with a Raspberry Pi server. Here are some disadvantages:
1. ARM architecture – Although the ARM is a greatly efficient and low powered architecture, it is not x86 and hence any binaries that are compiled to run on x86 cannot run on the Pi. The entire GNU/Linux distributions have been gathered for the ARM architecture and new ones are appearing all of the time. There are only a vert few applications that absolutely require x86. Wine that runs Windows programs does not work on the Pi.
2. RAM cannot be upgraded - The major components of the Pi are soldered to the motherboard, which includes the RAM of 512 MB. The GNU/Linux can easily run on this. The Pi makes use of around 100 MB of RAM whilst running as a small server (this excludes X11).
No comments:
Post a Comment