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NUC vs Pi — Workload Scoping (pending)
Open question (2026-05-23)
When the home-lab build progresses past jimmy-vps (GCP) into on-prem hardware, what runs on Intel NUC and what runs on Raspberry Pi? Scoping exercise pending answers to:
- What is the build? — home lab, music production rig, data pipeline, streaming, security?
- What's the primary workload? — compute-heavy, I/O-heavy, always-on daemon, episodic processing?
- Is this for Hinata infrastructure, side project, or both?
Initial NUC vs Pi heuristic (not yet validated against Michael's stack)
| Workload class | NUC | Pi | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Postgres (hinata-collector multi-tenant) | ✓ | RAM + IOPS | |
| FastAPI app servers | ✓ | ✓ | Either works; Pi fine at single-user scale |
| Whisper transcription | ✓ | GPU/CPU compute | |
| Music Mastery sound engine | ✓ | Audio realtime + low-latency | |
| Tailscale exit node | ✓ | Low resource, always-on | |
| Nextcloud / file sync | ✓ | I/O bound, Pi 5 + SSD adequate | |
| Grafana + Prometheus | ✓ | Pi 4/5 sufficient for personal load | |
| dbt runner / scheduled jobs | ✓ | Memory + parallelism | |
| iCal / mail-poller daemons | ✓ | Trivial workload |
Pickup
Awaiting Michael's answers to the three scoping questions above. Then Uncle Iroh runs cost-benefit (GCP monthly vs amortised NUC + electricity + network).
Source: inbox 2026-05-23-telegram-82208752.