I've normally resorted to buying raspberry pi's (I now have a Model 2B, 3B and 4) and don't have any major self-hosting requirements so I considered clustering them together. Given the current ARM architecture limitations on the older models, I decided I will bite the bullet and buy some more dedicated hardware. I also figured I could:
- Add the raspberry pi's into the cluster for some more resources if need be at a later date.
- Use the raspberry pi's as an isolated sandbox for testing
With Raspberry Pi 4's currently in low stocks, I started exploring mini PCs/NUCs. They are actually pretty cool, the specs are much better, the costs aren't that much higher and they are built to last.
I ended up getting Intel NUC 11 Essential Kit Celeron N4505 (Atlas Canyon) which was on special at CentreCom. I unboxed and plugged it in immediately only to realise that it is pretty barebones unfortunately.
The site doesn't cover it but it doesn't come with any pre-installed HDD or RAM (that's why it was cheap!) so I needed to get those off Amazon. Here's what I bought:
2 X 8GB DDR4 RAM
Installing them were pretty easy - plug n play, I was then ready to rock n roll!