A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device which you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something. They're that reliable from my experience.
I have a newly acquired habit of getting the thing which requires the least amount of maintenance for my needs. I can replace it with a more powerful, power hungry and noisier device if I really need that, however this is rarely the case for me, and I can use my laptop for that oddjob.
Sure, but there’s a lot more in it; like a power supply.
No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.
Maybe the tasks it does are light from CPU/IO perspective, but the burden I offload to it is tremendous.
The N100 systems I have are desktop systems which spend most of their life powered off or at standby.
Yes, but like I said there are also mini pcs that meet or exceed those specs that don't have any fans nor any coil whine. Of course you need bigger heat sinks when you draw more wattage (or maybe you're fine with some thermal throttling), but even this is quite manageable. I have multiple machines like this that are 100% reliable with zero maintenance.
I’m not ignoring or denying these systems’ existence. I just note that they don’t fit into my constraints and requirements for my home server needs.
Is this booting from the SSD.
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.