Thought it was me but out of 3 Pis I had all of them died rather sooner than later… To make things worse I barely used two of them. The only one I’ve got left is still randomly losing HDMI signal, I never know if I’ll be able to see anything when connecting it to any kind of display. Another one just stopped working all of sudden after just a year of working as a weather station. The third one sat in a drawer for a year and a half and wouldn’t run once I got it out.
Are we that unlucky or they’re so unreliable? Not a single electronic product failed me so often in the last 30 years.
- the network card of my first Pi (some 2 model) failed
- a PI Zero completely died years ago
- a PI Zero 2 W doesn't boot anymore but it apparently powers on
- a number of SD cards failed after months of use, but that's to be expected. I turn off swap and don't write log files much [1]
I'm left with a couple of PI 3 but I don't have a use case for them anymore and frankly the unavailability of the product doesn't make me feel like investing on it. It's becoming a kind of retrocomputing.
I switched to Odroid HC4 to build a NAS with it's two SATA slots. I can recycle a ton of disks I put in a drawer along the years. It's about 4 W with the disks off, plus whatever a disk consumes: 2 W for a 2.5 1 TB HDD and 9 W for an older 750 GB 3.5 HDD. I have other disks to test.
[1] https://ostechnix.com/how-to-write-log-files-in-ram-using-lo...
Edit: actually I'm using a PI 3 with a TV Hat to stream free to air TV to my phones and tablets around the home. I'm never sitting in front of the TV set.