Specifically I’m using the OrangePi Zero 2W and the Banana Pi M4 Zero (both are Pi Zero form factor), but I figure if it works in a Raspberry Pi it should work in these. Wondering if they’re worth the cost, if they work at all, and/or if it’s just asking for trouble.
The project I’m working on requires a good bit of storage. It’s essentially an “internet in a box” device that has a portable selection of media (Wikipedia dump, music, TV shows, movies, and books) as well as web-based software to view them (Kiwix, MPD+Snapcast, Jellyfin, Calibre-Web, etc) as well as some other utilities (PiHole for DNS/DHCP/ad blocking, Searx-NG, VPN clients and routing, etc).
The OrangePi is currently the working prototype, and it has a 512 GB SD card and a 512GB USB-connected NVMe. Due to a quirky wifi chip, it requires a separate USB wifi adapter to do hotspot. Because of this, it kind of sprawls and isn’t very portable without disassembly.
The Banana Pi has a better wifi chip and can do hotspot internally. So to keep my portable server keychain sized, I’d like to outfit it with either a 1 TB or 1.5 TB SD card for its media store rather than attaching a USB->NVMe enclosure. This one also has eMMC for the system, so it wouldn’t be booting from or writing logs, etc to the SD card. Most of the data/media on the SD card would be WORM (write once, read many) but would be updated/refeshed periodically.
Would a large 1 or 1.5 TB SD card (Samsung or Sandisk, depending on price) be a waste of money or be a cause of issues?
Any reason to stick to large SD cards? I have a really good experience running a cluster of rpis on USB nvme disks. I got cheap USB 3 nvme pockets and post-market/post-lease nvme disks. 4 rpis have been running like that for more than 3 years now. They boot in about 1 second, don’t have any spikes in energy usage and I don’t worry about writing or reading too much from them. Average read/write time is under 2ms.