Hacker News Reader

Comment by _xy8h | Hacker News Reader

I'd stick with a RasPi. There's a process to set a boot flag to allow booting from USB media. From there you can install Raspbian (or your other distro of choice) to any USB connected storage device. I've been using the same USB drive partitioned and formatted to 1/4th its capacity (to increase available blocks for wear leveling) for 5 straight years without any issues.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

View on HN

Folks, the OP was asking for alternatives to Raspberry Pi, but everyone keeps saying just use Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive or get some obscure second hand hardware.

I think the best alternative, while staying in the SBC realm, is a RockPro64 by Pine64. These boards have PCI-e slots and very cheap SATA & NVMe attachments. That way you get full performance from your SSD, versus a USB connection. And the boards have a huge number of community supported OS builds available. They are simple to install in a few clicks, with the official Pine64 installer.

The RockPro64 is highly underrated in my opinion. Especially when you consider the flexibility, available attachments & accessories, and wide range of use cases and OS options. A brand new board with 4GB RAM, power supply, and SSD PCI-e interface will run you only around $100 before shipping. Check them out. I have had one for a couple years and I'm super happy with it!

Boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e6...

Accessories: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64-accessories/?v...

Ultimately, OP was looking for a low power server without relying on a MicroSD. So no, it's not strictly an alternative to a Raspberry Pi because once you boot from USB, MicroSD durability is no longer the issue.

I really don’t mean this in a mean way, but I’d be surprised if the OP didn’t realize he could just jam a hard drive into the Pi with USB.

To be totally fair, this wasn't really a thing until recently

Very cool, would like to set up something similar myself!

> to increase available blocks for wear leveling

If you have the time, would you mind expanding on what this means? It sounds something like the pi would automatically fail over to new parts of the usb storage as old parts wear out due to too many reads/writes -- is that correct? Was the 1/4 capacity chosen for a specific reason?

The USB storage firmware itself will do this. ¼ was chosen to give a lot of space for this wear levelling to occur; wear levelling can't use occupied space, so it'd need to move data around a lot if the drive was close to full, which would increase wear.

Wouldn't this also work with a large enough MicroSD?

As I understand it, the firmware for the majority of MicroSD cards is very limited. The physical size and low price point are likely the reason you don't see these more complex features in consumer cards. Also, if I recall, there's nothing in the spec about levelling so you'd probably get some half-arsed buggy implementation anyway.

Thank you for the clarification!

MicroSD cards tend to have much worse durability and IOPS than common USB sticks, and especially, say, an M.2 SSD to USB adapter.

what sort of usb storage?

I've looked at a few common flash drives and none of them support trim, so I'm not sure how the drive would know that the space isn't occupied

Normal SATA SSD + usb2Sata adapter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com