I've used a Rock Pi 4 b before, worked well but the SSD connection is in a weird place (sticks out) so you might need the SSD adapter addon thing for like 20$.
All freaking expensive this SBC's in the moment
Yeah, for the same money you can buy a used small form factor office PC. I recently bought two HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Minis for 90€ each and you have way more IO than on any SBC.
I'm currently running it in a VM with 1.25GB of RAM with SSD-backed storage. This weird amount of RAM was chosen by looking at the high-water mark of memory usage, because the physical host the VM was on for a while was limited in RAM.
Works great. Zero problems. Much of the time it doesn't even use close to the full 1.25GB.
Edit: you definitely want SSD-based storage for monerod in 99.9% of cases.
Edit 2: this setup stays below 10% CPU usage in nearly all cases when given 2 virtual cores on an i5-8500T. Very low utilization.
Definitively
Small form factor tiny PC like a Lenovo Thinkcenter M720q or similar or an EliteDesk 800 or similar. They are very cheap used, have very decent CPU, usually 8GB or 16GB or more and a SSD.
Buying an overpriced and limited SBC instead of these is wasting money. Especially that you can upgrade them with a 4TB HDD & 2TB+ NVME drive, up to 64GB of ram. They have like 6 USB, 2 or 3 display output...
When they do almost nothing (like synced node for example), they use like 10Watts...
And you can mine on them too, and they are stackable :)
I have a Intel NUC 7PJYH here which is running 24/7 for the smart home etc. maybe i will first of try if it can handle Smarthome/TVHEad/ and Monerod + P2Pool. While syncing now the CPU usage is quite high
Yeah, it's normal, you can't compare a NUC with a premium Tiny PC.
NUC have budget / low end CPU (In you're case, a Pentium Silver Jxxxx), While these tiny PC have Core i5 or Core i7. Can find model with 8th gen+ at very decent price.
I have found an efficient Fujitsu MoBo and a PicoPSU on the attic and now i am organising a cheap i5-6500T. Should be good for approx. 1300H/s at 30W. As an always on "placeholder" minig to the pool while the sun does not shine.
Optimally any CPU that supports AES and 4GB of RAM, on top of a small SSD drive for the blockchain (nearly 150GB ATM).
This is something you will be happy about: pinode.co.uk.
Pinode uses single board computers, cheap small boards, to run p2pool and monerod.
It currently supports: Rock PI 4, Raspberry PI, Rock Pro 64, Rock 64, Odroid XU4, AMD64 cpus (so you could use an old laptop) and more... (full list of supported devices with images).
You will also need an external memory to be able to store the blockchain, a cheap SSD you can find in your local used market is ok (something like 500gb will be alright even for the future).
Why is this cool?
Well, this is cool because single boards are cheap, require low power and easy to use.
Better than a VPS?
I'd say yes, because you own the hardware and it will cost you way less monthly.
Thanks for the Link to the project, that sounds really awesome
Told ya :) Always happy to help