The problem I have with the Pi4 is the cases - they're not designed for NVMe cooling. The Argon One case with the additional NVMe caddy puts the disk in the bottom of the case with no heatsink, no cooling, and no way to dissipate heat. It cooked my first NVMe disk at over 90 degrees C until it failed within (from memory) six months. I have the new NVMe disk with a small heatsink, on the end of a USB cable, not in an enclosure, which isn't very robust. I see that their latest cases (Argon One v3 and Argon Neo 5) have built in NVMe heatsinks with slightly better cooling. The reviews say the Neo is pretty cool, but they focus on CPU rather than NVMe cooling - a larger case might be more effective, I wonder if the feedback I gave them helped push them this way.
I don't know what my next home server will be. If anyone develops a R.Pi case that has active cooling for NVMe disks including space for a heatsink I'd stay with them, but I may end up with a small computer based on intel N150. I'd rather stay with arm though.
Apparently you can get standalone NVMe boards so your disks can be in a separate case. I haven't found one yet that has good cooling and a case though, other than NVMe USB enclosures with a fan like the ones on Amazon. This kind of thing looks interesting, good passive cooling, but US$120.
My Pi4 4GB running Home Assistant, SyncThing, MySQL, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Trilium, Watchtower, and a Wordpress instance is using only 1.7GB of RAM, the other 6GB or so is being used as cache. My cloud server running four Wordpress instances, MySQL, Redis, and a password manager is using even less, 1.3GB.
I guess the 16GB is more aimed at the desktop setups, as Jeff Geerling mentioned you may now be able to open more than one chrome tab.
timmmay:
My Pi4 4GB running Home Assistant, SyncThing, MySQL, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Trilium, Watchtower, and a Wordpress instance is using only 1.7GB of RAM, the other 6GB or so is being used as cache. My cloud server running four Wordpress instances, MySQL, Redis, and a password manager is using even less, 1.3GB.
I also have a pi4 4GB, but its only running a wireguard service and pihole, so not really even getting fully utilised and dont see the need to upgrade it. I do have another pi4 8GB running Ubuntu as a desktop which I mainly only use to fire up RDP sessions to my home network. It does struggle as a desktop, even chrome is slow but does run RDP sessions beautifully.
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