Raspberry Pi4 4GB vs Microserver G7 N40L 8GB of RAM

pchealer

Hello

So I have an old HP Microserver G7 N40L  with 8GB of RAM but have recently bought at new Raspberry Pi4 with 4GB of ram.

The Pie 4 has a:
Quad core Broadcom BCM2711B0  A72 CPU

Whereas. the HP Microsserver has a dual core AMD Turion II Neo N40L (1.5 Ghz) K625

Would it be fair to say that this little Raspberry pie is more powerfull that the old HP Microserver?

If it is I may get rid of it.  I'm very sensative to noise and this old server creates an anoying vibration. (Maybe if I replaced the mechanical disks with PCe disks or SSD this would help.

I also like the idea of storing the Pie in my attic and if it does fail then as it's fairly cheap can just replace it.

So do you think its work me keeping the old server?

Cheers

mickevh

As with so many aspects of IT, there's no simple answer as "it depends" on the use case. Let me draw an analogy using vehicles:

Which is "best" (or "most powerful" if you like) - a sports car with a 400HP engine or tipper truck with a 600HP engine..? Of course, technically, if one focuses only on the engine output, then the truck is "best." However, if I wanted to win a race at my local motor racing circuit, I'd be much more likely in he sports car than the wagon. And vice-versa, if I've for 100 tonne of wheat to shift to market, the the sports car is almost useless and it's the truck I need.

So, for example, serving files is a pretty low CPU low & RAM activity, especially in a SOHO use case, so pretty much anything will do. My microserver has 16GB of RAM and barely uses 1GB (actually about 700MB) "just" serving files, but spin up a few virtual machines and it chomps through RAM really quickly. Whereas, real time transcoding or gaming will take as much CPU horsepower as you can give it (what happens with transcoding is  picture quality and stream size is traded off against the available CPU horsepower.)

For basic SOHO file serving, I suspect either will be fine (though I'd be concerned about the NIC on the Pi - I'd prefer Gigabit - and I'd want to run Linux on it rather than Windows with 4GB.) SSD is of course silent in operation, though it's an expensive way to facilitate "seldom accessed" mass storage.

pchealer

Thanks I will have a think about that I really want to use them for first!

ChuckMountain

The Pi 4 has gigabit networking now but as you say the OP needs to decide what they want to use it for.

The HP is in "NAS" form already so adding disks or SSDs is easy.  Adding those to a Pi is certainly doable but they would generally be external drives and USB etc.  I would personally find that a bit less tidy than an all in one solution with more potential points of failure.

You don't mention what OS you are using and whether that is a factor.