I’m in the research phase of a home project build out. I’m looking to build a 4-5 node cluster for some home projects. I’ve been looking at single board computers and some system on module boards to do it.
I’ve seen some ITX boards from pine64 that allow you build a cluster in a normal ITX case. However the boards it supports don’t have enough RAM for me. I’ll need at least 8GB of RAM for what I’m trying to host. Ideally 16GB. So I’ve been looking at a Rock pi 5, but something similar would be fine.
Does anybody know where I could find boards or cases or cables that would allow me to host 4-5 SBCs/SOMs in a small case? This feels like really unknown territory for me at this point.
do you realy need that very little formfactor? What about those Lenovo or Dell mini PCs? You can strip them off their case and Maybe 3DPrint a case that sandwiches them together or a least use Stand of screws like those Pie clusters.
You can add as much RAM you basicly want, make use of SSD’/NVMEs and they can be very low on power consumption.
I was looking at arm64 SBC’s mainly for their cost (both initial cost and energy cost). The rock pi’s will run me $220 a pop with 16GB of ram, pretty cheap. Especially when power cost is factored in.
I don’t actually need them to be tiny, but something in a compact package would be nice as my office isn’t huge. I figured a case/clusterboard would be a tidy way to keep everything together and keep pets out. Definitely cleaner than having multiple power bricks, a bunch of cables, and a zip tied fan.
The mini pc’s aren’t a bad idea. Although they’re far more expensive in comparison Getting something I can put 16GB of memory into costs 2-3x as much. This does give me the idea to look at chromeboxes though, I think some of those are (or were) upgradable.