A love-hate relationship
- it is a minimal viable hardware with up-to-date linux kernel
- a closed source binary blob required to boot aka. ThreadX
- Known problems:
- previous RPi generations are not suitable
- power-supply: quality >3A ; official RPi or Pimoroni
- USB-SATA adapter needed - decide by tests and recommendations, not price
- good experience with the Suntronics/GeekWorm X825 board whoc halso had the option to power the directly disk with a 4A barrel connector and the RPi through built in PoGo pins.
- SDcard: use min 32GB and Endurance type Sandisk/Samsung. If the OS si islow might be the first sign of failure - have a low threshold for ching the SDcard.
- Disk: use tested 1TB SSD models. Bigger sizes and some models with onboard cache tend to have power spikes and resulting freeze / disconnection from the RPi.
- a UPS is a must as cold-restarts will corrupt data
Shopping list with keywords: https://github.com/raspiblitz/raspiblitz#amazon-shopping-list-buy-parts--build-it-yourself
- more power - still energy efficient
- built in battery
- screen and keyboard to manage
- wired LAN connection (can use an USB adapter)
- Second built-in disk in WWAN slot as seen in Thinkpads
- If there is an optical drive can use an optical bay drive caddy
- Twitter community: https://twitter.com/i/communities/1563029300911058944
- Still can be a big saving on hosting despite higher power usage
- Unlimited storage with disk redundancy (ZFS)
- Cockpit webinterface
- ECC RAM to prevent data corruption in memory
- Multiple disks to use a checksumming, "self-healing" software RAID like ZFS
- Avoid hardware RAID cards - often another source of problems and recovery is not possible with other hardware