A recent Armbian kernel upgrade bricked my entire Rock64 cluster (5 cards) and after a week debugging, it seems beyond repair.
I would like to find some ARM-based SBC for self-hosting that’s reliable enough to run for the next five years.
My question for you is reliability and support, rather than specs, as I found Pine64 lacking in support and 4 out of 8 cards failed in the period of two years (one got replaced by warranty).
I have already an x86 cluster, so my interest is for ARM vendors and do not need wifi, gpio, audio, hdmi, etc…
Any experience with Orange Pi or Radxa?
I gave a bit of a heads-up on a different thread, but the TLDR is that I use usb for the main disk and there’s an issue with usb in the latest uboot for rk3328. I tried flashing the SPI to an early version but as soon as I would update a kernel to LTS, I would start having problems.
To be honest, I feel that this is a solvable issue, but also that I’m done trying to make these cards work on my own. (I wasted a lot of time and money fixing the eemc modules and the sockets).
At this point I reached a conclusion that I would use my selfhosting time to focus on software and networks, and just use reliable hardware, even if it means doing less and paying more, and leave soldering for my diy projects.
That said, the Rock64 pro sbcs I have are still going strong despite being used non-stop for the last 5-6 years.