Hardware choices - thinkpad, pi or odroid?

Hardware Server
1

Hi,

I’m trying to decide what to run openHAB on. My choices are:

  • old thinkpad T60 laptop with 3GB RAM and 50GB SSD, running ubuntu
  • pasperry pi (the old one, not the model 2)
  • odroid C1 running ubuntu

I’d be using the Aeon zwave stick

I suspect the T60 is way overpowered but I like the thought of a proper hard disk and not always having to remote in. Battery backup is a bonus. But would I have any problems using 10 year old hardware?

I’d be grateful for any thoughts!

thanks,

Dan

2

The old Pi runs slow. When I first tested OpenHAB about 6 months ago, I ran it on a Pi B+ and time and time again there was considerable delay in reaction. It varied greatly, from 1-2 seconds to 30-40

3

Agreed. Of the 3 the one I would rule out would be the old Pi. With only a single core and 512M memory, it is severely taxed. The Pi2 is quite similiar to the Odroid C1, with a slight edge to the Odroid (I have all 3 here), and would run things just fine with minimal power draw if you are worried about such things. The only thing to be aware of is where logs and persistence storage happen. Writes to SD card, for example, would be a concern.

4

My old HP microserver died recently and I moved my OH2 system over to using the ODroid XU3 Lite. It’s at the upper end of the costs for small boards (I think it was about 120 Euro), but I wanted something with good processing power (so I can access persisted data quickly), and low DC power. I also bought their 64GB SSD which is meant to help keep the access speeds up.

I’ve not benchmarked it, but it seems to work pretty well so far :smile:

Chris

5

thank you all! Odroid I think it is (if I can turn off logging; and I don’t think I need persistent storage for what I’m doing)

6

*moved to the server category.