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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 4B

14owners with an opinion
70%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 owners 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.
Recommends it
My current desktop system is a Raspberry Pi 4B with a 64 bit quad core ARM processor at 1.5 GHz and 4GB memory (8GB version is also available). It runs BSD's and Linux distributions, it has no UEFI, and I can tinker with it to my hearts content. It's great for writing and coding and everything else I do. If I want to play games, my son has several games consoles. I recommend that you take a look at the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. They're cheap too :-)
Likes itHasn’t owned it
It's not because of NVIDIA but because of Moore. We have SGI-level five-dollar microcontroller boards now. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Maximum_IMPACT says: > Maximum Impact graphics are the highest tier of SGI's IMPACT graphics offered both on the SGI Indigo2 and SGI Octane workstations. They include a 27MB frame buffer and have 2 raster engines (i.e. are "2RSS" boards). ... > Two GE11 Geometry/Image Engines: >> Power the graphics subsystem >>> 960 MFLOPS for transforming triangles >>> 960 MIOPS for processing pixels >>> 600,000 gates each >>> Note: The refreshed Octane 'E-series' Geometry engines were capable of 1344 MFLOPS >> Two RE4 Raster Engines: >>> Provide the pixel-fill capabilities >>> 234 Mpixels/sec gouraud fill rate I think the Raspberry Pi 4B has 8000 megaflops https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/fsc3fw/perfor... and I think that's just the CPU. That's roughly 5× the performance of the Indigo²'s Maximum Impact card. The Pi 3 CPU came in at 2700 megaflops: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/55862/what-i... and I think the GPU is something like four times that. Of course, benchmarks can be misleading, but if anything I'd expect this number to understate the difference, since the SGI card was a fixed-function pipeline. You can do all kinds of crazy visual effects on the Pi's CPU that the Indigo² couldn't touch. And of course the Pi's texture memory and framebuffer is measured in gigabytes now, not megabytes.…