Good question. #[2] would you respond to this inquiry?
Discussion
You absolutely can, though we do not recommend using external drives with the Pi unless you have a 5W power supply (not the default Pi power supply), the SSD is self powered or uses a powered USB hub, and the cord connecting the SSD to the Pi is very high quality.
This is becuase the Raspberry Pi 4 is notorious for not providing enoguh power to the external SSD, which can lead to unreliability or even data corruption. That is why Start9, Umbrel, MyNode, etc have all moved away from the Pi to other hardware.
HOWEVER, the Pi is perfectly fine if you do not use an external SSD. Instead, we recommend using a 128GB or 256GB high endurance microSD card, no SSD at all. Start9's Server Lite is exactly that, a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) running entitely off the microSD card. Pretty cool.
Obviously, you cannot fit the entire Bitcoin blockchain on 256GB, which means your full node will be running pruned, which is perfectly fine. It will prohibit you from running Electrs and Mempool, that's it. Everything else on the Martketplace will work great, including LND, Core Lightning, BTCPay server, etc, etc
Sorry, 20W power supply (5v/4a)
Seems several people haven’t had issues with their Pi and their hard drive powered by it. Could it be that it becomes an issue if you are running multiple applications? If you were to keep it fairly simple and run only a couple or few that this decreases the likelihood of a failure and data corruption? Additionally if there was data corruption would you know because either the node entirely doesn’t work anymore or certain applications don’t work anymore or something else?
Umbrel shows in their webpage how to install in Raspberry Pi. I have this setup and it works flawlessly with SATA SSD.
Hi there, doing a small follow up on this topic. I just read this in a different thread. Nothing new, same approach: Start9 seems to have a stronger security.
https://nostr.band/note1e96zee5a8gh2gdsnmhmkglx2zqw7zgfrn3wufgk67kzankv9f4ksvu588z
Nice! Thanks for coming back and sharing Sandy 🤙🏼
Ok, i add an interesting finding that i read. While Start9 uses https vs. Umbrel, the LN node of Start9 doesnt use 24 seed phrase as Umbrel does.
I read this in a thread. I cant confirm it.
Both OS have trade offs. I run Umbrel and I will stick to it until I see clear disadvantages. I have zero issues with Umbrel right now.
I prefer to focus on learning LN node management. 🤙🏻
Okay thank you for that update. I heard stsrt9 is going to have a major update at some point in the future. It will be interesting to see what that looks like.