Downsides to Raspberry Pi Alternatives

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Learn about some of the risks when choosing an alternative to a Raspberry Pi for your project.

I have a lot of low-cost single-board computers (SBCs) at my house. And, I've written a number of articles for Linux Journal that discuss how I put those computers to use—whether it's controlling my beer fridge, replacing a rackmount file server, acting as a media PC connected to my TV or as an off-site backup server in my RV (plus many more). Even more recently, I wrote a "Pi-ventory" article where I tried to count up just how many of these machines I had in my home.

Although the majority of the SBCs I use are some form of Raspberry Pi, I also sometimes use Pi alternatives—SBCs that mimic the Raspberry Pi while also offering expanded features—whether that's gigabit Ethernet, faster CPUs, SATA ports, USB3 support or any number of other improvements. These boards often even mimic the Raspberry Pi by having "Pi" in their names, so you have Orange Pi and Banana Pi among others. Although Pi alternatives allow you to solve some problems better than a Raspberry Pi, and in many cases they provide hardware with better specifications for the same price, they aren't without their drawbacks. So in this article, I take a look at the downsides of going with a Pi alternative based on my personal experience.

Third-Party Support

The initial Raspberry Pi was a runaway success, and all of the subsequent models have sold incredibly well. There are only a few variants on the Raspberry Pi platform, and later hardware upgrades have done a good job at maintaining backward-compatibility where possible (in particular with overall board dimensions and placement of ports). There also have been only a few "official" Raspberry Pi peripherals through the years (the camera being the best example). When you have this many of a particular hardware device out in the world, and the primary vendor is mostly focused on the hardware itself, you have a strong market for add-ons and peripherals from third parties.

The secondary Raspberry Pi market is full of cases, peripherals and add-on hardware like USB WiFi dongles that promise to be compatible out of the box with earlier models that didn't include WiFi. Adafruit is a good example of an electronics vendor who has jumped into the Raspberry Pi secondary market with a lot of different hobbyist kits that feature the Raspberry Pi as the core computing and electronics platform. That company and others also have created custom add-on shields intended to stack on top of the Raspberry Pi and add additional features including a number of different screen options, sensors and even cellular support. There's even a company that offers a case to turn a Raspberry Pi into a small laptop.

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Banana Backups

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:58:49 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

In the September 2016 issue, I wrote an article called "Papa's Got a Brand New NAS" where I described how I replaced my rackmounted gear with a small, low-powered ARM device—the Odroid XU4. Before I settled on that solution, I tried out a few others including a pair of Banana Pi computers—small single-board computers like Raspberry Pis only with gigabit networking and SATA2 controllers on board. In the end, I decided to go with a single higher-powered board and use a USB3 disk enclosure with RAID instead of building a cluster of Banana Pis that each had a single disk attached. Since I had two Banana Pis left over after this experiment, I decided to put them to use, so in this article, I describe how I turned one into a nice little backup server.

The Hardware

Although Raspberry Pis are incredibly popular and useful if you want a small, low-powered, cheap computer, they have their downsides as network backup servers. One of the main downsides is low-performance disk and network speeds. A Raspberry Pi maxes out at 100Mbit on the network and offers only USB2 ports if you want to add a hard drive. Those limitations are what drove me to look for other solutions for my home NAS in the first place, and it's one area where a Banana Pi has an edge. Even though the modern Raspberry Pi 3 has a faster CPU, the old Banana Pi still beats it on network and disk I/O. This makes it pretty ideal as a standalone system for home network backups, depending on your needs.

In my case, I'm not backing up terabytes of media; I just wanted bare-metal backups of my servers and workstations along with backups of important documents. The size of your backups is important, because the Banana Pi is limited to a single SATA2 port, and the board itself can power only a 2.5" laptop drive. So if you want to stick with local power, you are limited to 2.5" hard drive sizes. That said, if you were willing to splurge on an externally powered SATA2 enclosure, you could use a 3.5" drive instead. In my case, I happened to have an old 2.5" 500Gb laptop drive lying around that I had since replaced with an SSD. Note that you probably will need to order the appropriate SATA2 cable to connect your hard drive with your Banana Pi—it doesn't typically come with the board.

Although I imagine you could just have the board and a laptop drive sitting on a shelf, I wanted to protect it a bit more than that. Since I have a 3D printer, naturally I went to Thingiverse to see if it had any cases for a Banana Pi. It turns out someone made just the thing I needed—a Banana Pi case that also had mounting points for a 2.5" hard drive. I printed out the case (in yellow, naturally) and was able to mount the board and the laptop drive without any issues.

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