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?
I don’t have an answer for you
Just wanna say I love your project!
This would be great for parents too
Thanks. It’s basically a travel router + portable app server + media library. I wanted to play with the much more capable Pi Zero clones and it turns out they can run quite a bit of stuff at the same time and the features snowballed as I just kept adding more stuff (I got the models with 4 GB RAM).
Definitely, at least once I add some GPIO switches to set different modes for the networking (that’s kind of a pain point now if you need to setup a different wifi client connection, switch its internet connection from wifi to USB tethering from a connect phone or switch the ethernet port from LAN to WAN, etc).
We had a power outage during a snow storm week or so ago and the prototype ran all day from a power bank and kept a limited Jellyfin library online for everyone (mostly Star Trek and Marvel movies since those are the only things everyone in the house can agree on haha).