Hardware recommendations
Raspberry Pi 4
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
Laptop
more power - still energy efficient
built in battery
screen and keyboard to manage
Preferences
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
Home server
Still can be a big saving on hosting despite higher power usage
Unlimited storage with disk redundancy (ZFS)
Preferences
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
Use a minimal VPS with ZeroTier or Tailscale to tunnel services to a public domain
Build guides:
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