It’s not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant…
If you have the lid closed, you’re looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.
I’m just saying it’s not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.
And you are often paying 140-200 for a pi nowadays to make it have the same usability as a laptop (pi, power supply, sata hat, data drive because SD cards simply fail after a while under server IO) while you can get cheap used laptops for 0-100.
So unless you are running it for more than half a decade (which rarely happens with selfhosters for a main server), you are probably spending more in total on the pi.
I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
I used to think so too, but my pi-hole just died the other week after four years of uptime. Couldn’t work it out, finally pulled the SD card out to reinstall the OS and found my laptop wouldn’t recognise it.
Made me glad I don’t run my mailserver on a Pi anymore!
Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn’t.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don’t need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
Where are these cheap e waste laptops with gpio and actually low power?
Digging through e-waste bins is one of my hobbies.
What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.
l a p p i e s
That word made me hear the whole thing in an Australian accent.
