So: I am thinking of upgrading this blog- and DMZ-attached server to something a little more powerful, viz: perhaps an 8Gb Raspberry Pi 4 with Ubuntu; but – since I am a former Enterprise Computing wonk – I would like to upgrade it to something that would help me worry a little less.

What I primarily want is “root and swap and all the other crap on a decent drive, with good SQL database performance, good IOPs, multiple webservers, and the ability to deal with shitloads of logging, without rapidly wearing out and dying”. Anyone who says “you can’t do that all on a Raspberry Pi” is not trying hard enough.

“Spinning rust” eats power, and I don’t trust physically petite spinning drives, hence: SSD is the most sensible target, I think.

The RPi does not have PCI-E so I am bounded by USB-3.0, but that’s okay; and since I am bounded by PCI-E it doesn’t really matter whether I go with SATA or NVME. The former is a bit cheaper.

Fortunately, there are lots of blogposts to help in this space:

• https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspberry-pi-4-usb-ssd
• https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/enabling-trim-on-external-ssd-on-raspberry-pi
• https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/uasp-makes-raspberry-pi-4-disk-io-50-faster

…to name but three.

Because I like enterprise-class drives that hopefully won’t die, I am willing to pay a little more to get something which will make my life easier.

Amazon have a nice price on the “mixed-use” Kingston SEDC500M/480G for £99, and the relevant UGREEN SATA enclosure apparently supports both UASP and TRIM.

It advertises “1.3 DWPD for 5 years” – that is reassuring to me.

THE THING THAT WORRIES ME is that the specsheet on the DC500M says that the maximum write-heavy power draw is 7.5W:

…and be assured that, either on this system or on some future system, with USB3 or eventual PCI-E “hat”, I will attempt to hammer this drive with writes on multiple databases, logs, and filesystems in general. So: P=IV thus 7.5(P)/5(V)=1.5(A) which exceeds the 1.2A full USB bus power that the RPi can supply.

Ergo: what do I do to mitigate this? Can I?