I used to run everything with Pis, but then got a x86 USFF to improve Nextcloud performance.

With the energy price madness last year in Europe, I moved most things to cloud VPSs.

One Pi is still running Home Assistant, hooked to my heating/ventilation unit via RS485/modbus.

I had a ZFS backup server with 2 HDDs hooked up over USB to a Pi 8GB. That is just way too unreliable for anything serious, I think I now have a lot of corrupted files in the backups. Looking into getting some Synology unit for that.

For anything serious that requires file storage, I’d steer clear from USB or SD cards. After getting used to SATA performance, it’s hard to go back anyways. I’d really like to use the Pis, but family photo backups turning gray due to bitflips is unacceptable.

They are a great entrypoint to self-hosting and the Linux world though!