Raspberry Pi filesystem reliability with writes? And using an RPI for hosting?

[Nominal Animal]

Is this still true for the RPi 4?  I believe for that model the Ethernet controller is in the SoC and not attached to USB.

Only Broadcom knows for sure, and they're not exactly telling.

In the datasheet and peripherals datasheet, the only mention of Ethernet refers to ETH_PCIe interrupts, which include PCIE_0_INTx, PCIE_0_MSI, etc., but also USB0_XHCI_0, i.e. the interrupt for USB0 (XHCI referring to an USB 3.0 controller).  Whenever the 'Pi folks describe it, they say "it is part of the SoC and does not use the old USB 2.0".

The datasheet indicates that the Ethernet controller is not accessible from the ARM side –– it is not listed as one that can be safely accessed from the ARM side ––, so either it is connected to the USB0 (USB 3.0 controller), or to the GPU, or the datasheet is wrong.  Because the RGMII pins are exposed on the GPIO header, and the board uses Broadcom BCM54213PE Ethernet controller (which connects to RGMII pins), it seems like it is connected to the GPU.

If only there was a proper block diagram of the connections on RPi4...  For example, like the Odroid-C4 block diagram showing the Amlogic S905X3 SoC connections.  (The Medium Access Control, or MAC, is integrated on the S905X3 SoC, and is connected to RTL8211F PHY chip providing the Ethernet port.)

[ejeffrey]

Yes the pi4 has ethernet on the soc.  The pi4 USB3 ports are also provided by an external controller using the pcie interface.  It's overall a much better system setup than the earlier versions although I don't know what if any problems it has.

[SiliconWizard]

Yes the pi4 has ethernet on the soc.  The pi4 USB3 ports are also provided by an external controller using the pcie interface.  It's overall a much better system setup than the earlier versions although I don't know what if any problems it has.

Yup, thought so. Ethernet is definitely not USB on the Pi4, and the throughput is thus much higher while less taxing on CPU.

[eugene]

I understand the audience here is tilted towards DIY, and we each likely have a laptop or two (or three or four) sitting around looking for something to do. That describes me too, but eight years ago I bought a Synology DS214. I put two WD red 2TB drives in it and it has been running trouble free every since.

I use Linux regularly, but I'm not familiar enough to setup a server and keep it going. The Synology web interface is intuitive and offers dozens of add-ons like music and video servers (which my TV instantly found and happily plays video from.) A VPN server that allows me to remotely access my files from anywhere in the world. Etc. Each of which i installed and got running in just a few minutes. There's a git server available that I might install today.

I understand that many of us really enjoy the process of turning a SBC or old PC into a NAS. I'd say that describes me in a lot of ways, but IT and networking make my head hurt.

For under $200 you can have a new Synology (w/o drives) that runs two redundant drives (RAID 1?) that anyone can get working in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Just thought I'd put it on the table since we're sharing different solutions.

[David Hess]

If you are using PC hardware, then solutions like TrueNAS and Proxmox are available which considerably simply setup and management.

[elagergren]

I wonder if any real world Raspberry Pi users are using them for hosting any "busy" web sites, and if so, how its working out for them?

Yeah, so I've got like fifteen or so Pis (an assortment of versions, too). Some are used for CI at work. Some are used as syslog journaling servers. Some serve internal websites. All of them have been running 24/7 for well over five years (most of them using budget SD cards) and I've yet to have one (noticeably) fail. I've honestly had more trouble with other forms of storage, like USB hard drives.

(PS: just noticed that I'm posting on an older thread, sorry.)