

I have a radxa zero 3w seed box that I also stream movies from by mounting it as a network drive. It’s running dietpi and all traffic goes through a wireguard VPN, it’s connected to a sata SSD via a cheapest USB dongle from aliexpress.



If you want to connect multiple drives a dongle like this one

or multiple cheep sata-usb dongles connected via externally powered usb hub should work but your speeds will be limited by the usb.
I haven’t tested it on an sbc but I use it to connect HDDs to my PC that I power from it’s PSU when I do backups. There are also special raspberry pi HATs that allow you to connect multiple SSDs.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/radxas-sata-hat-makes-compact-pi-5-nas/
With my setup I get ~12 MiB/s download (probably limited because of the VPN overhead) , ram usage doesn’t go above 512 MB even with dietpi dashboard and some of my scripts running. The biggest issue was heat, I had to buy radiators and a fan to keep the temps in the safe range. Other than that everything works great.

You can check benchmarks on dietpi’s website to see what sbc would work best with your network.










It’s not just a british thing. I find that reddit blocks VPNs but not tor exit nodes, they even have a .onion website.
https://www.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/
I’ve set up a private redlib instance that routes all traffic through tor and I have a browser extension that redirects all reddit links to my server. If you have a vps/home server this is a very seamless setup or you can use one of many public redlib instances or browse through tor directly.