I recently got dunked on for saying the Raspberry Pi 5 makes a great home lab server if you equip it with an SSD drive. And I don't really blame the guy, because until the Pi 4b, they were pretty awful, and for the 3B and below you were stuck with running the OS from a microSD card.

The Pi 5 is a huge level up in performance, with four BCM2712 Cortex A76 cores running at 2.4 GHz and up to 16 GB of RAM. But the real game changer is that it has a PCIe 2.0 slot that can be run at 3.0 speeds. This means you can connect an M.2 SSD drive for vastly faster throughput on the order of 800-900 MB/s compared to 150 MB/s for a microSD card.

This website presently runs on a cheap Linode VPS with one shared server class CPU core (probably just a thread), 2 GB of RAM and I think 20 GB of storage. It runs pretty well, although it can choke on thumbnail generation (memory) if uploaded images are large.

I also have a hobby site running on a headless Raspberry Pi 5 (pictured) with four cores that are all mine, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB of storage via a Samsung 990 Pro M.2 SSD, which is connected by a PCIe hat. The Pi sits in an isolated network segment and connects to the internet via a Cloudflare tunnel.

For single threaded workloads, the Linode core is probably stronger, but for a multi-threaded workloads such as a webserver, the Pi 5 has significantly better performance. It is not memory limited. It has more storage than I can use. It will handle any sane home lab services with ease. It's (relatively) cheap. I don't have to pay another damn subscription fee to use it.

It's also tiny and dirt cheap to run. What's not to like?

I have a second headless Pi 5 (8 GB RAM) on my home network that I use as a Claude Code terminal. I login via WSL on my Windows box. Claude Code has been writing software for me, so the Pi has also turned into a convenient Linux-based development box as well. I installed the brilliant Remote - SSH plugin for VSCode, which let's me work on the files remotely from my Windows machine.

The SSDs are mounted via the Geekworm X1001 PCIe to M.2 Key-M NVME SSD hat (about $13) and the P580 Pi 5 PCIe metal case (about $11). I use the Pi 5 Heat Sink and Active Cooler ($6). The case is well ventilated and is a nice pair with the active cooler.