I’m booting openwrt off a usb c thumb drive connected to a fanless Celeron mini pc. The pc is cool but the thumb drive is so hot i can’t touch it.
Any ideas?
Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.
If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.
UNRAID is designed to run off a USB drive, they have recommendations on what USBs to buy on their site, might be worth a gander. You should be able to write all the info on your current USB to the new one without having to reconfigure anything.
My guess is log files are being written to it? Might want to install a proper drive internally and redirect log storage. With less activity the USB drive should not heat up anywhere near as much.
Thanks yeah I have a lot of services and Docker containers running on the device. I’ll try disabling logging.
If you have docker containers and other stuff all on that USB drive I’d really reccomend getting it all off that USB (not just logging) and onto a proper drive of some kind. USB thumb sticks are not reliable long term storage, you will wake up to find the drive failing one day and good chance you lose everything on it with little to no warning.
Another option would be to redirect logs to a ramdisk. That’s what I’m doing on a RPI to try to minimize writes on the sd card. The biggest downside is that you lose your logs when you power off the device, but if the alternative is not having logs at all, I think it’s still a better option.
Of course, installing a proper drive is still the best solution.
Great odea. Any guides/howtos you can share?
This might be a good start: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config
