The current setup writes to the systemd journal at least twice every minute... It's next iteration is getting a proper nvme.

You can buy cards that support SMART if you want to track wear, but they are expensive.

Rpi5 has a pcie slot if you want a cleaner setup.

This is not specific to RPis. When an SD card is subjected to "unpredictable" writes it creates potential risk of corruption. The writes are triggered by software, not the RPi hardware

There is no rule that says the RPi user must mount the root filesystem r/w on the card. It can be mounted r/w on mfs or tmpfs, for example, and the card can be removed after boot. Been doing this since 2012

Zero writes to the card, no corruption

It's true these corruption issues are "notorious" but that's due to RPi owner behaviour, not the RPI hardware

True SD cards are less than ideal.

But also I suspect half the problem specifically with Pi and SD cards is that people use cheap-ass SD cards and maybe ones they found in the bottom of a drawer that may or may not have previously been used in another device (e.g. camera).

I suspect if people bought industrial SD cards instead of consumer-grade junk they might get a better lifespan out of them.

A few days ago the HDD had its 100,000 Power_On_Hours anniversary. :) According to SMART this is way past the expected/ designed life time of the disk (the normalised value reports "1" since a few years when the disk hit about 42,000 Power_On_Hours)

So you never know. It either works or it doesn't. You have backups for the worst case.

I assume it’s a bad capacitor or something. I tried changing out the power adapter, but that didn’t help.

I don’t see myself ever buying another Beelink.

I run a Proxmox server on my Dell Optiplex SFF 7070. With the SFF size you can add two low-profile PCIe cards, if desired. In my case I added a 10Gbit NIC.

The reason I would go with a used Dell / Lenovo / HP is that these tend to be well-built machines that run for years and years 24/7 in offices and proven to work well.

Yes! It runs completely fine on a Pi, except for the machine learning service. The good news is that you can run that service on a separate computer with a GPU and point Immich to it. Immich will use it when it's available and I think you can configure it to run all the queued ML jobs at a certain time when you expect the computer running the ML service to be on.