Which Raspberry Pi to Use? (for pi-hole mostly)

I am planning to use the hardware to run Pi-Hole and possibly some network monitoring / bandwidth shaping functions .. nothing else.

Will the zero suffice? Wifi vs ethernet the opinions seem to be 50/50

Comments

  • How much does ethernet cost for the zero?

      • The Zero costs a bit more to set up with mini HDMI and USB hub/dongles. You would get quite a bit more grunt and better networking with a 4 for $55 and would need fewer support parts. Element 14 sometimes discounts the outgoing Pi boards into the mid $30 range. There's probably a heap of old early Model A boards people have no use for at the same spec as a Zero that you could test on.

  • -1

    I don't see much reason to get any Raspberry Pi besides the #4 model with the 4GB RAM.

    Support for the others are going to dwindle as everyone attempts to upgrade to the much improved #4 model.

    There are better/more powerful SBC's than the RPi4, but they don't have the support and community which the Pi foundation has.

    • You don't really need the 4gb ram I think 2gb ram is the best value.

      • True, even the 1GB is enough for many things.

        But I can guarantee many people will get buyer's remorse for not getting the higher specced one, since the price is going to be negligible in the long run. Things like storage can be upgraded, but not the SoC.

        And the extra RAM will enable better graphics, and use the CPU better for multitasking. There's not going to be a Raspberry Pi 5 for many years, and when it comes it's not going to be a huge upgrade like 3->4 is. I mean it'll probably be a 16nm Cortex A75, so you're expecting a 20-50% better performance and efficiency, but not the +300% performance increase we're seeing now with the current upgrade.

  • pi-hole doesn't use much in the way of resources. I would go for Ethernet rather than wi-fi though. I think pihole 3B+ would be fine, and once the 4s are out they should be a bit cheaper.

    Useful to note, you can run pi-hole on any linux based system not just the Rasp.Pi.

  • +1

    Piggybacking off this thread if I may..

    Would Raspberry Pi 4/4GB have enough power/processing to run the below?:

    • NAS
    • Pi-Hole
    • Media server
  • +1

    From what I know you could do the net monitoring but any Pi would struggle with bandwidth shaping.
    I understand one of the reasons pfsense is nor available for Pi id that its network performance is poor.

    • Cheers, looks like pi hole only it is then

  • +1

    I run pihole successfully on the original Pi, running Dietpi as the base OS. So, doesn't need much grunt at all…

    Similarly, pihole runs without issue on the NanoPi NEO (also running Dietpi). Also run Smokeping alongside that and it hardly breaks a sweat.

    https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&…
    https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&…

    • Which of the two would you suggest using for pihole? these dont have a display output too hmm (sorry am new to this)

      • +1

        The Neo's are both the same, depends whether you want the OLED screen or not. The cheaper unit doesn't have the OLED screen or a microSD card (you may have one floating around…). I'd just save your money and get the cheaper one :), it's absolutely fine for pihole.

        And yes, no display output, but I use them as a headless device, so no problem for my use case.

        To set it up,
        1) Download dietpi
        2) Flash to microsd
        3) Boot with microsd
        4) SSH to microsd and install pihole using script

        (Dietpi is also available for the Raspberry Pis so you can set them up in the same way too if you like).

        If you do end up going the OLED, use the script at https://dietpi.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3077 to stop OLED burnin

        • Have you had issues re-imaging the microsd? some people recommend to run the OS from USB drive instead of SDCard as Pi-hole writes a lot of logs and SDCards can get corrupt easily.

          • @kehuehue: Never - I just had a cheap pack of Strontium 3x 16gb cards from Amazon so have some spare if needed. If you really are worried, buy high endurance cards (used for Dashcams, etc)… however I've been running non-high endurance cards and had no issues for three piholes

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