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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 4B

27owners with an opinion
72%of verdicts positive
6/3positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for build quality.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
SBCs are great for public webservers and suited to save you quite a bit in energy costs. I've used a Raspbery Pi4B for about 5 years with around 10k human visitors (~5k bots) per year just fine. I'd like to try a RISC-V SBC as server, but maybe I have a few more years to wait. I don't run into resource issues on the Pi4B, but resource paranoia (like range anxiety in EVs) keeps me on my toes about bandwidth use and encoding anyway. I did actually repurpose my former workstation and put it in a rackmount case a couple weeks ago to take over duties and take on some new ones, but it consumes so much electricity that it embarrasses me and I turned it off. Not sure what to do with it now; it is comically over-spec'd for a web server. Most helpful thing to have is a good router; networking is a pain in the butt, and there's a lot to do when you host your own when you start serving flask servers or whatever. Mikrotik has made more things doable for me.
Neutral
Yeah have a collection of minipc - they are indeed great. This build was more NAS focused. 9x SATA SSD and 6x NVME...minipcs just don't have the connectivity for that sort of thing >Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins. I have a bunch of rasp 4Bs that I'll use for a k8s HA control plane but yeah outside of that they're not idea. Especially with the fragility of SD card instead of nvme (unless you buy the silly HAT thing).
Doesn’t like it
It's funny, I started with rPis for the same reason, but I'm about to replace them. I bought 20 rPi 4Bs for my homelab, and I just couldn't get them to do what I needed. I was looking to run a home k8s cluster and the Pis were just not suited to it at all (don't use sd storage for k8s 'cause it'll burn out the card w/writes, booting off usb was unstable even with powered usb hubs, netboot turned into an enormous pain in the neck).
Doesn’t like it
These tiny PC with 4" boards have changed the game. Pi is sort of in-between the Arduino and these. As article points out the price difference is not much. I bought 4B and found it slow, hot. Thanks to COVID I could resell it for a tidy profit lol. Of course there are use cases I can imagine.
Likes it
I had a laptop running Windows for 12 years as my home server, hidden in a closet. It ran a couple of c# apps as a service and was an ftp server as well. Last month I decided to buy a raspberry pi (4B 2GB) to scratch multiple itches (arm processor, linux, low power consumption) and it replaced the server without a hitch, and better than I thought! No weird splash screens from windows after updates, 2GB is vast for me when running headless, dotnet apps ported with minimal effort, and the list goes on. Only downside is the USB can only power one external 2.5" hdd, and I didn't want to add a powered usb hub.
Neutral
RPi is the only ARM SBC that I've seen good broad support for. You can run their Linux distro as well as mainline distros. Every other SBC I've tried has required some boutique distro with custom drivers that weren't generally available or worse still, just didn't work. I will say, when the scalping of RPi happened over the pandemic, a lot of the x86 mini-pcs became a much better option in terms of TCO. I invested a bit into DeskPi cases for 8gb RPi 4b models. In the end, a $150 or so N100 box is a much better deal, with the case, psu, memory and storage. But it, of course, depends on what you're doing or trying to accomplish.
Likes it
It really is! I built a system to monitor/control my wood stove with a pi. The GPIO pins made it easy-ish to hook up an infrared temp sensor over i2c. I found a relay hat that allowed me to switch 120 VAC to control the stove's fan. My pi 4B had plenty of power to run a Ruby on Rails server to build little charts/graphs, a config UI, and some cron jobs. Lots of very powerful Lego blocks, basically. https://github.com/locofocos/wood-stove-rails
Likes it
I've gone this direction with my home lab stuff as well. I have an assortment of older RPis up to a couple RPi 4Bs. Most I bought to use on projects where I wanted Linux plus GPIOs and they were and still are good for that purpose. I've also given in to the temptation to use them as little servers on my LAN for various sorts of things. I've even tried to use them for HTPC boxes and they have worked ok. However I have sent all my Pi's back to projects where I just want Linux plus GPIO. For everything else I replaced them with cheap mini PCs. 1) a bare Pi on a workbench/desk is fine but when connected to a TV in the living room has a very low WAF. 2) the arrangement of ports on a Pi are a complete pain in the ass. Even with a case any installation of a Pi looks like a careless hack job. 3) MicroUSB is complete fucking garbage. The port/connector wears or breaks and the slightest bump powers off the Pi. MicroUSB power supplies are usually also garbage and typically have criminally short cables. "Appliance" appropriate power for a Pi costs more than the Pi itself. USB-C in the 4B is better but I've only got one of those. 4) like power supplies a decent microSD card that won't randomly fail in a Pi ends up costing as much as a Pi. I replaced a bunch of individual Pis running servers with a single mini PC with an N95. The Pis weren't taxed with the server loads so the N95 doesn't break a sweat. It's also way easier to manage since the various server apps are managed by a docker c…
Neutral
I use some Pis for various things in my house including Zeroes through CM4s and 4Bs. The Zeroes run Raspbian configured with the read-only filesystem option. I have found it necessary to uninstall `unattended-upgrades` because the overlayfs employed for read-only root caches disk writes in RAM and the update/upgrade process exhausts RAM. For the same reason I disable swap. It makes no sense to swap to RAM on a 512GB system. Upgrades are tedious since they require disabling overlayfs, rebooting, upgrading, rebooting, and enabling overlayfs. I wrote Ansible playbooks to perform these tasks. ( https://github.com/HankB/Ansible/tree/main/Pi ) I have a Pi 4B performing as a file server and running Debian (not Raspbian) It boots from an SD card so that the entire HDDs can be used for a ZFS pool. To reduce wear and tear on the SD card I have mounted `/var` to a ZFS filesystem. I should probably use `tmpfs` for `/tmp`. I use a Pi CM4 to run HomeAssistant and that boots and runs from an NVME SSD where durability is less an issue.
Doesn’t like it
Wow, that's rough. I use a set of raspberry pi 4Bs as a k8s cluster (with an SSD over USB, otherwise etcd crashes cause the storage is too slow). Luckily I have 5 of them (and a k8s cluster is fault tolerant), because the USB disk randomly does not get enough power -- the voltage drops a lot even pulling 2-3A out of most chargers, I can't imagine doing 5 (the USB cable resistances start to become a factor at higher amperages).
Doesn’t like it
In some situations power delivery to the Pi is not the issue. It is power delivery from USB to the SSD. I ran into this myself and it was weird. * When the Pi 4B first came out, I connected a cheap Inland (Microcenter house brand) SSD, booting from that, and it ran fine for a while. (Months?) "Better" SSDs like Crucial MX100 had problems under heavy load and I suspected that the instantaneous power demands of the SSD were not met by the USB port on the Pi. (The Pi 4B supports UAS and older Pis did not and the older ones never had problems with USB connected SSDs.) * At some point it started to run into difficulties with the SSD disconnecting under heavy load, requiring a power cycle to restore operation. At that point I began using a powered USB hub to work around this. * Recently a user on some forum (which I have forgotten) suggested that one particular SSD model from Kingston worked fine w/out the need for a powered hub. I acquired one and tested [1] and found this to be true. Just for grins, I also tested some other SSDs that had previously only worked with a powered hub and they worked fine when directly connected. This leads me to believe that the RpiOS folk have been tweaking some settings in the "firmware" [2] that have modified the power delivery from the USB ports. [1] Testing involved running several disk benchmarks as well as 'stress-ng' to load the storage as much as possible. [2] I'm unclear what the Rpi folk mean by "firmware". As an embedded systems developer…
Neutral
Nice. I have an OrangePi 5 (w/ SSD), a Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V (POE+modded case), and 6 RPi 4B (4 powered by POE+ booting from SSDs on powered USB hubs). AmateurTip: Don't get a ROCKPro64 because they're paperweights due to a dead fork of Linux. ]: And assorted non-Linux MCUs: ESP8266/32/32+LoRa, Arduino UNO/Mini/Nanos, MSP430, STM32, BASIC Stamp, and various PICs.
Likes it
I'd recommend setting them up in parallel and using this fantastic driver: https://iosoft.blog/2020/09/29/raspberry-pi-multi-channel-ws... . Anecdotally I was able to drive 16 200 pixel strings at ~180Hz with a Raspi 4B. Running in series with the regular adafruit library would work as well but at this number of pixels the refresh rate might start to get a bit choppy, and you probably want to add power in the middle of the string regardless so the wiring isn't any harder.
Likes it
I recently put something together similar to this, to switch between my personal PopOS/Windows machine and my work Macbook Pro. I used one of these manual USB switchers, ( https://sabrent.com/products/usb-sw30 ), and connected its switch to a Raspberry Pi 4B via GPIO (4B is overkill by wanted hardwired network). There's a small separate keyboard (which will later be a macro keypad of some sort), connected to the Pi. Using inputexec ( https://github.com/rbarrois/inputexec ) to detect keypresses and then firing off a specific script to send a network request to the LG TV I use as a monitor to switch the source, and then set the GPIO connected to the USB switcher to high or low to switch the keyboard/mouse to the other machine. I can also turn on/off the TV using the same WebOS API (and Wake-on-lan) as used during the source switch. A Kasa smart outlet also gets toggled to turn on/off a BenQ ScreenBar Halo ( https://www.benq.com/en-us/lighting/monitor-light.html ). So with 4 different keypresses, I can switch to Work, to Personal, turn off monitor and light, and turn on monitor and light.
Neutral
Two for PiHole (primary and backup DNS) One for Stratum 0 NTP server (using GSP module with PPS) One for Home Assistant One for monitoring the solar power at my cabin, using a 4G USB device to send data home. The Home Assistant runs on a 4B, the others are using 3B's and a clone (NanoPi Zero). Got some Pi 4's that I use for various Linux experimentation and such. Sometimes I find it easier to get a Pi 4 up and running than a VM, and other times I need the GPIOs.
Likes it
It's my Wi-Fi hotspots, gateway, and network servers. I've got more powerful machines but it can route packets, serve http requests, manage dhcp, simple things like that without problem. I use a USB 3.0 Ethernet cable for the second port. It can keep up just fine.
Likes it
have the Jellyfin integration running on Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4B, works brilliantly for music, movies and series. Appears to have no support for photos. Android & Roku apps are fast and seem to have less network buffering than Plex, no 3rd party accounts or logins needed, on Plex I had to keep logging in every few days not sure what the issue was.
Doesn’t like it
Raspberry Pi in my experience (4b) is less than ideal for audio playback duties. Pops and clicks from buffer underruns have proven quite difficult to 100% eliminate. I think it's primarily due to some devices being pinned to CPU0. You can run irqbalance, but not everything can be moved around.
Likes it
For long term applications I much prefer passive cooling (AKA a hunk of metal.) I have one Raspberry Pi 4B in a case with a small heat sink on the processor and a small fan driven from the GPIO pins. It keeps the processor within limits even when overclocked and heavily loaded. Some day the fan will stop working and the processor will overheat (under heavy load) and throttle to prevent self destruction. I have two Compute Modules (CM4s) and found a passive heat sink that is finned aluminum that covers the entire module. There is no fan to fail. I can overclock the CM4 to 2 GHz and load it for stress testing and it remains well within limits. One of these is equipped with an NVME SSD and I was surprised to see it reach excessive temperatures under heavy loads despite the PCIe x1 connection on the Pi. I got a "hunk of copper" NVME cooler, cut it to fit a 2230 NVME and it keeps the NVME SSD within reasonable limits.
Likes it
I don't have baseline for comparison - running HomeAssistant for a few months on RPi 4b, currently 34 days uptime and no issues in sight, htop processes list fits in half of the page. Can't comment on SD card lifetime because I'm booting off SSD - I actually haven't had SD card die ever before... Probably luck
Doesn’t like it
Ahah thanks, yeah if you don’t need 400 cores, why have them? I mean, sometimes you need power but if you don’t need it, is better to have a slightly older hardware, but more reliable and, above all, with less consumptions/environment-bills impact. In example: I’m using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole that is a totally waste of power, I’ve installed the same sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is running more than fine …but on a Raspberry PI 3B!
Neutral
I have desktop 13900k+4090 that is in permanent hope to be transformed into homelab style server with something like esxi/hyperv for you pass through into one client vim where I will do windows work/some gaming and when windows not in use passthrough to Linux vim for stable diffusion , also one ubuntu vm for Linux workstation. I really don’t like dual boot/VMware workstation. For small stuff I have raspberry 4b 4gb and 2 drive symbology nas. I have gaming asus router axe-11000, but want to switch to 10gb Ethernet, and that will lead to upgrading nas too. A lot of stuff is limited by the fact that I’m renting so even dropping cable to fiber modem in garage was adventure For storage I have
Neutral
I got 7.64 SPECint2006 on my Lichee Pi 4A @ 1.85 GHz (same processor, different board). Raspberry Pi 4B @ 1.5 GHz gets 9.22 with the same compiler version and flags. In fairness, the Cortex-A72 in the Raspberry Pi is the nth iteration of Arm cores whereas the C910 is essentially the 1st generation (the C906 is completely different and in-order). I wouldn't make too many conclusions based on this about the future of RISC-V and its implementations, but I'm looking forward to the next wave of higher performing cores coming to market.
Likes it
Are these power figures measured at the wall? If so, both are astonishing. My file server with an old Xeon, 16GB RAM and 5x 7200RPM HDDs uses about 95W when idle and about 150W when I throw something at it that works the drives. My desktop with an I7-4770K, 32GB RAM, some SSDs and a single spinner ids about the same. IIRC if I push something compute intensive at it, it can break 200W. OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
Neutral
I self host and use a RPi 3B+. Actually I have a total of 3B+ but only one is actually doing anything for the website. I have my database running on a RPi 4b with 4gb. I could easily consolidate to a single Pi but early on I had different plans for each one but just keep 'em running for no good reason. I'm fortunate in that I have a static IP. Initially I was using NOIP and it worked great but then noticed my IP address never changes. Also, NOIP still exposes your actually IP which I didn't care for. Now instead of NOIP I rent a cheap $4/month VPS with nginx to reverse proxy to my home. This does require me to open a port, which again I'm not a huge fan but it is what it is. My next iteration will be where I close the port and do updates via SSH. I'm the only one who uses my website so it is more of a playground for me than anything. Finally, I feel setting up a server - or just interacting with a remote computer, be it across town, across the country or in the other bedroom, is a good skill to have. When I got my 1st remote job that gave me access to a server I was more than comfortable to do what I needed to do.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
As rPi 4Bs are hard to get still / overpriced, unless you’re absolutely married to the rPi, check out OrangePi 5B for a much faster CPU, more RAM, eMMC, and good wifi OR get the 5+ for the same minus wifi (it has an E-key m.2 to add it) but adds a 2280 m.2 so you could throw a 4TB m.2 SSD on there (which are about $200 now) and now you’ve got a pretty dang good little NAS that’s fast and fanless for about $350-400 all-in. Did I mention the 5+ has 2x 2.5G Ethernet?