Did you add the fs2ram stuff. Uses RAM for all the temp writes and stuff so SD card only deals with actual file storage access.

I mean, I think you have reason to trust SSDs more anyway. They're just physically designed for more wear and tear than SD cards are, even if I've never destroyed an SD card myself I'm aware of their lack of resilience compared to SSDs.

And yeah, I always dropped the extra money for Samsung Pro SD cards, maybe that's part of it, too.

Ah, gotcha! I was worried for a second that I made a poor choice.

have an ASUS PN51 with the Ryzen 5 in it running Ubuntuwith docker containers for each appliance.

It could be that I was using particularly shit SD cards, or putting too much continuous load on them, but I have killed a handful of them over the time I used them. I dunno, could be user error for sure.

I have never managed to kill an SSD though, so I trust them much more.

Something like that, yeah. Though this one has better CPU (Celeron 3205U), and two RAM slots apparently. Also mine didn't have an SSD too. I too didn't know they made mini PCs.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/840057824814

So close to something like this, eh? I had no idea Gigabyte ever even made mini PCs.

The best code editor to use is that one that works for you.

I knew a guy who I swear did half his work in notepad, but it worked for him.

I've been using Rapsberry Pi's for almost a decade now and I have yet to burn out a single SD card on them. But maybe I don't really put them under the same strain others do.

It's an upscale text editor, not an IDE. Plenty of options if you want fancy IDE features.

In Turkey. Comparing to US eBay prices our second hand market prices are quite high generally. This one didn't have a secure payment too, by secure I mean it wasn't protected by the website, basically bought it via paying over IBAN. It was kind of a gamble. I guess that was the reason why no one bought it before me. Lucky me. :)

That's just a lot!

Yeah, I checked second hand market and Pi's are almost none-existant here and the ones I found weren't cheap either. I also noticed that there were a lot of 32-bit Atom CPU mini PCs for 25$, but they were a downgrade from my netbook. Comparing to them 40$ is great I guess.

Not really Intel specific, just intel seems to be the most commonly available.

I just lazily used "Intel" to mean x86.

I tried to get logs into memory, but found that it was a bit tedious chasing down a dozen or so services that logged to different places. And when my pi developed a spontaneous reset issue, not having logs was a bit of a problem.

Nice! Where did you but it?

Why Intel mini PCs? I run an AMD mini PC that seems to work great but I don’t ask much of it yet.

The pricing is just insane. Its $450-500AUD for a 16GB pi5 (without storage), and I recently got a secondhand nuc with 16GB and storage for $200AUD.

Pis also don't seem to have a second hand market (which as a hoarder of pi3's I am part of the problem).

My Pi 3b is configured to host PiHole, Unbound, and Kiwix (Wikipedia), yet it only writes to SD once a month for Kiwix, and once a week for PiHole. Unbound and all logs live in memory.

I agree. Love how it's lighter than Debian <3

I had a pi4 booting from a USB ssd, but it was very flakey. Just a slight bump on the SSD and it would disconnect and never remount, so I wasn't super confident with it. Happened with a few different SSDs on different ports as well.

As for power, my pi4 + SSD was chugging down 15w, and the nuc that replaced it was also around 15w when limited properly, so it isnt as clear cut as it used to be. That was with identical services, homeassistant and a few local web services. I suspected the pi4 was never really able to idle.

Love to Alpine Linux! I run it on a mini PC as a home router and on a Raspberry Pi. It’s fantastic!

Yeah I agree, I can do many more things with this comparing to RPi. Interestingly this one also has a microSD slot, though I went with regular SATA SSD and obviously it's quite faster than a system running on a microSD card. I just can't believe the pricing on RPi devices. It's almost three times the price here comparing to what I got.

I agree with you about the sd cards. But pi 4 and higher can boot directly from SSD (in a usb enclosure, or for pi 5 via pci-e add on card). It takes a lot of the pain out of hosting on pi. I also still have an old pi 3b chugging along as a NUT server running off an sd-card with a read-only file system - another solution for the card rot problem.

And they are still lower power then anything x86. For me a mix of both pi and mini-pc work great.

Yeah, maybe this is a good thing. I don't like ARM that much anyway.

Currently only Pi-hole but I'll install Jellyfin and Syncthing soon. Initially I was planning to install Joplin server as well but since they started to lean on LLMs I'm looking for alternatives, maybe even something homemade, haven't decide yet. Surprisingly you can do many things with these devices. Even my netbook can do a lot of things, so I'm expecting more from this.

Honestly, AI pricing or not, raspi just isnt a good time for a home server. I used to churn through SD cards on mine, and the software compatibility was quite annoying, particularly with docker images. Intel x86 minipcs have been far easier to deal with IMO. And $40 is a bargain.