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Comment by rubatuga | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the hardware, I would not recommend to use a raspberry pi, not only are they hard to get and expensive but as another comment states the RPi rely on SD cards which are prone to corruption. I think it's better to rely on second hand enterprise hardware if you're looking for something cheap.

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FWIW, Raspberry Pi availability is starting to recover, and they do have the ability to boot off of a USB drive (including SSDs) or a network server these days.

That said even SD cards are probably fine if you're not doing a ton of writes. (And it looked like a USB drive was attached to one of the PIs in the picture. So, presumably the important data is going there.)

You're not wrong that second hand enterprise hardware would be more reliable but, honestly, I think this setup is fine for what they were trying to accomplish - especially if they already had some of the hardware laying around.

I have used 4 RaspberryPi (3 and 4) for a few years for various needs : Gitea server, Home Assistant server, Syncthing main repository, Borg backup repository, Wireguard VPN and network gateway between 2 LANs. I haven't encountered any problems with the SD card, if you buy the class 10 SD cards (the same you would use for your dashcam and security camera). One option is to use the F2FS file system on the card (I did this on my Raspberry) or, as others have suggested, use an SSD or NVMe drive. The main problems I encountered with the Raspberry 4 were heat dissipation (use a metal case with direct contact to the CPU without a fan, this is the best option in my tests) and external USB 3 drives interfering with the wifi. The latter seems to be a known design issue. Considering all this and the prices, if you don't really need the Raspberry's ability to control external hardware via GPio, and if you want to keep the same network design (separate devices), there are many mini PCs with passive dissipation, 2 or more Nics, lots of RAM and SSD support, for a similar or lower price all considered ... or buy one or two real servers and virtualise everything with Proxmox.

Now they aren't expensive (like 6-12 months ago), one RPi -the one with the database- is relying on the SSD (so no issue) and the other is using RAM logs so the data written to the SD card are minimal. I'm running a Raspberry PI with an SD card and RAM logs since 6-7 years with the same SD without any failure.

this is advice I hear very often, but where do you buy second hand enterprise hardware? I went and bought mine second hand from the internet but ive got no idea where to get enterprise stuff

eBay? I don't know where you are in the world you are but in my country it's basically flooded with the stuff.

If you're in a major city, look for salvage outlets. There are usually operations who recover decommissioned hardware from businesses, and then thrift-store style, sell it to hobbyists.

I got an old Dell PowerEdge 610 server second hand on gumtree.com.au (classified ads page, I guess like craigslist or something?) for $400. The guy selling it had bought it for his home theater without realising that commercial servers are (a) noisy as hell, and (b) useless for graphics. :P It's been running our half-dozen server VMs at work for the past 3 years and it still blows my mind that you can get a server with 12 CPU cores and 96GB of RAM for that price.

Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.

A mini PC would also give you 64GB and 12 cores. It consumes a lot less power.

Other than ECC RAM, any benefit?

The mini PC may not be as reliable, but this is not for production use.

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