Are you ready to buy a new Raspberry Pi for your home lab? Seriously, I’d delay that purchase and consider the Orange Pi 6 instead. With two 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports and many more I/Os than the Raspberry Pi, the Orange Pi 6 is the best choice for homelabbers.
What is the Orange Pi 6?
It’s just a different flavor of Pi.
If you’ve never heard of the Orange Pi, it’s actually another version of the RaspberryPi, newly manufactured by a different company. However, its ARM processors and single-board computer design are basically where the similarities end.
Raspberry Pi began making cheap and affordable single board computers for the hobbyist public. Orange Pi, on the other hand, is a much wider range of SBCs with higher specifications that allow you to do much more.
However, this advantage of having a wider range of options is also a disadvantage, in a sense. While Raspberry Pi only has two single-board computer product ranges to focus on, Orange Pi has many more, and that means the documentation is much more fragmented and board-specific.
The community behind the Orange Pi is also much smaller than that of the Raspberry Pi, although that’s not necessarily a disadvantage. Also, it’s worth noting that the Orange Pi changes its board design much more frequently than the Raspberry Pi.
If you’re looking for a single board computer that packs plenty of power and doesn’t mind doing a little work yourself, then the Orange Pi might be the best choice for your home lab. Otherwise, stick with a Raspberry Pi.
But these simple comparisons are far from the whole story. Actually, the choice between
Orange Pi 6 offers extensive I/O options
Dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports are much more useful than you think
Raspberry Pi has always focused on compact but capable systems. However, they have been held back by an unchanging form factor. Really, the Raspberry Pi form factor hasn’t changed in over a decade. Some components have been moved around or replaced with newer connectors, but other than that, things are largely unchanged.
Orange Pi is doing things a little differently. He Orange Pi 6 It takes the I/O offered by Raspberry Pi to the next level. To begin with, there are two 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports on the Orange Pi 6.
Before we dive into the rest of the crazy I/O options the Orange Pi 6 offers, let’s first discuss how something as simple as a second Ethernet port could be useful in your home lab.
If you have ever wanted run your own firewall or routerthen you’ve probably come across the requirement of having two Ethernet connectors to run the platforms properly. While this is easy to do with something like a USB Ethernet adapter, it’s always better to do it with built-in hardware.
Additionally, Orange Pi not only installed traditional Gigabit Ethernet connectors on the Orange Pi 6, but also installed 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet. This means you can easily use it to handle your multi-gigabit network natively.
Fantastic Ethernet support is far from the only benefit the Orange Pi 6 offers. While the Raspberry Pi 5 requires an additional HAT to use NVMe drives, the Orange Pi 6 has two (full-size) M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots on its bottom, as well as an M.2 2230 KEY-E slot for an upgradeable wireless card.
In addition to those features, there are also two camera inputs, a microSD card slot, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, dual USB-A 3.0, USB-C, two more USB-A 2.0 ports, and much more.
The I/O options on the Orange Pi 6 are so much better than the Raspberry Pi, it’s not even a fair comparison. The Orange Pi 6 takes everything the Raspberry Pi does with multiple additional HATs and packs it all into one sleek package.
The Raspberry Pi may be the default option, but it’s not always the best
Raspberry Pi is conventional but much more limited
For a long time, The Raspberry Pi has been the gold standard for single board computers. However, the Orange Pi is changing that. It has much better hardware, a more powerful processor and practically much more of everything.
In particular, I love that the Orange Pi has the ability to run dual NVMe dips without any additional hardware and that you can easily upgrade the WLAN chip when new standards emerge.
Add to that the fact that the Orange Pi 6’s chip is capable of 45 TOPS for AI computing out of the box, and comes in 8GB, 16GB or 24GB LPDDR5 versions, and you have a home lab powerhouse, ready to run anything you throw at it.
If you’ve only looked at Raspberry Pi before, consider the alternatives before your next purchase
It’s easy to go with the tried and true option, but sometimes it’s better to go with the unique outliers. Orange Pi SBCs may not be the easiest to get your hands on, but they definitely have a lot more to offer than traditional Raspberry Pi systems.
From extra I/O to more power and additional capabilities, if you’re looking for a high-end single board computer to run your home lab, the Orange Pi could be your best choice.
