Choosing The Right Hardware
When deciding on what hardware you need for your server, you need to know what you're going to use it for.
Raspberry Pi and traditional desktop operating systems have differing install processes, but use the same software.
When you're running one or two services, a Raspberry Pi would probably suffice, while running your own personal cloud services might require a refurbished desktop computer. Running your own media server may require a faster processor, a decent graphics card and adequate storage space for digital media.
Computational Processing
Choosing the type of main processor you will use for your server is an important decision.
The Raspberry Pi – and other single-board computers – use a different type of processor than the one you'd find in a traditional desktop. ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) is a new class of processors that are in the same family as the one that power your cellphone. Built for power efficiency, they cannot often handle sustained heavy loads and will overheat. These cost-effective mini computers are great hosting a personal website, BitWarden, Home Assistant or Grocy.
Raspberry Pi computers are efficient enough to run off of a battery, while traditional computers need to be powered directly from a socket.
Traditional computers – such as desktops, laptops and servers – use an evolution of the same processors first developed in the 1970s. They are known as x86 and named after the Intel 8086 that the architecture is based on. These processors focus on sustained processing power and can handle much more intensive tasks. These types of computers are great for hosting your own personal cloud with varied services, such as OwnCloud, Jellyfin, qBittorrent, or media procurement services.
Graphical Processing
While Raspberry Pi computers are useful for small computational tasks, they can often lack the graphical processing necessary to do complex tasks. These computers do not dedicated graphics processors and instead rely on a "system-on-a-chip" that shares graphical and computational power. Generally, these types of systems cannot be modified to add more graphical processing power.
Raspberry Pi computers work well for sporadic tasks while traditional computers excel at multi-tasking tasks.
Traditional computers have a powerful advantage here because they are so customizable. Many modern processors have a graphic processors integrated on them with decent power. Thanks to the extensible PCI-e interface in desktop computers, we can install a dedicated graphics processor – or a graphics cards – with much more dedicated power.
Dedicated graphics cards have specialized tools that allow them to convert videos much more efficiently than the main computational processor. These can be helpful for tasks that deal with images, such as processing a movie with a media server.
Memory
Test