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3D Printed Raspberry Pi Server Serves Up Fourteen Slices of Pi
The Raspberry Pi has notable performance for a pocket-sized SBC but why not multiply that power? This awesome project comes to us from a maker at Uptime Labs—it's called Raspberry Pi Server Mark III.
The Mark III is essentially a 3D-printed Raspberry Pi server rack, capable of housing up to 14 Raspberry Pis, each powered by the official Raspberry Pi power over ethernet (PoE) HAT, along with 14 2.5-inch SATA SSDs connected to the Raspberry Pis via a USB 3.0 to SATA adaptor.
The project began with a 3D-printable server rack model found on Thingiverse. Wanting to improve the design, Uptime Labs made some changes with the model. Multiple iterations were produced until arriving at the Mark III.
This unit can house even more Raspberry Pis than the original model and uses less filament to produce overall. This setup is huge but compact, requiring five 80mm fans mounted to the side for cooling.
Visit the Uptime Labs website for more details on how this project works or download the files and recreate it yourself. Be sure to check out our list of Best Raspberry Pi Projects for more cool creations from the maker community.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
Not sure what to do with 14 RPis at all. What is the point to have them 14? Computing power? How many ppl will do this?
So maybe I'm ignorant but how easy is to manage some application (or write one) to distribute its own workload to multiple machines when this task is sometimes a struggle within a single machine? And how about storage and dozen of other aspects?
Better then building 14-RPis rack (for example from RPi4 with 4GB RAM, decent SD cards, 14x PSU or one big, fans, filament for the case) ... cca $1000 ... one shall buy a decent server from ebay/Craiglist/etc or buy some tiny desktop with Ryzen (i.e. Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE ... whole machine can "eat" around avg. 10W) for a half price.
I think this is too small for the Guiness record and too much for anything reasonable.
