Pi's lack IO so they have quite poor performance for a lot of drives. They also aren't really very competitive price wise compared to low end AMD64 machines that have considerably more computation and IO capabilities at this low end price point. What Pi's are good at is very low power consumption and being small, once you add 4 hard drives small and low power don't matter much anymore and you wont take up much more power and space moving to MITX.
ARM64 does limit what software you can run as well as does the anaemic GPU hardware. They are good for other things and very small servers (like PIHoles) but once multiple drives are involved they aren't the right solution anymore.
It would be possible with a Pi or any other ARM or RISCV board, but most of those don't have NVMe or SATA and have very limited bandwidth to the USB ports, PCIe, or ethernet. If you don't need high performance that can be perfectly usable, but it will run into bottlenecks if you push beyond basic use.
Pi’s are a pain when it comes to power, storage and expansion.
They’re hardly competitive on price compared to an old nuc too. Even a new N100 with ram and ssd can be purchased heaper than a barebones Pi 5.
Pi's lack IO so they have quite poor performance for a lot of drives. They also aren't really very competitive price wise compared to low end AMD64 machines that have considerably more computation and IO capabilities at this low end price point. What Pi's are good at is very low power consumption and being small, once you add 4 hard drives small and low power don't matter much anymore and you wont take up much more power and space moving to MITX.
ARM64 does limit what software you can run as well as does the anaemic GPU hardware. They are good for other things and very small servers (like PIHoles) but once multiple drives are involved they aren't the right solution anymore.
Thanks.
It would be possible with a Pi or any other ARM or RISCV board, but most of those don't have NVMe or SATA and have very limited bandwidth to the USB ports, PCIe, or ethernet. If you don't need high performance that can be perfectly usable, but it will run into bottlenecks if you push beyond basic use.
Plex/jellyfin, torrents, immich, other server stuff.