They’re not cheap though - about ~$150 for the board with 4GB with a decent USB power supply and cable.

There’s a few Rockchip RK3399 based units with PCIe NVMe M.2 slots that I reckon would handle usenet downloading very nicely. I would like to try a faster ARM-based SBC however.

Maybe BitTorrent is different, but I couldn’t be fucked trying as I rarely use BitTorrent. The Pi’s CPU and I/O can’t really keep up with the downloading and unpacking for usenet. Get a fast microSD card for your root filesystem and whatever size external HDD you like and you’re good to go.ĤK enthusiasts with really fast internet connections should probably stick with their x86 boxes. 4GB would be plenty even if you ran a few extra services. Running Plex, Sabnzbd & Radarr, RAM usage never cracked 1.5GB. If all you do is watch 1080p media on your local LAN and have a normal internet connection (sub-250mbit), the Raspberry Pi 4 will do a pretty good job. Plex will try convert incompatible media, but it is a fruitless endeavour, as the Pi just doesn’t have the grunt and lacks any sort of hardware video encoding acceleration. Of course, the catch here is that you can’t transcode anything.

Pi plex server