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 don’t understand ‘beyond repair’?
The hardware is damaged by a kernel upgrade?
It’s not impossible, merely unheard of.
Rock64s had several issues with emmc slots, however one way I had to circumvent it was flashing the SPI allowing me to boot from usb, following the official guide: https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/blob/master/recipes/flash-spi.md
The issue here is that with the recent updates on u-boot, some older models have issues with old u-boot systems, and while I can flash again to the previous working SPI and u-boot, I can’t make it work with the latest lts kernel.
Could it be solved? Sure, if I invest time solving the issue and compiling my own kernel version, I guess.
Is it worth it? My time is more limited than my money. I’ll rather some cash on three rpi5 or similar, than wasting more time on a set of cards that have been failing on several things for the past five years. (lattepandas and rock 64 pro had no issue during the same amount of time)
At the end of the day, I like selfhosting services but I also like having free time :)