I'm also running ceph (using the rook kubernetes operator) in my homelab. Been running this setup for 9 months now with 2 cheap HP elitedesk workstations i picked up on ebay and 2 8TB HDDs in each.
Since this setup has run incredible smooth so far, I plan on using SolidRun's HoneyComb LX2 as a ceph node with bigger disks and nvme write cache in the future. I looked at the raspberry pi 4, but was not too impressed by the single PCIe 3.0 lane, since I also plan on using NVME disks as ceph's metadata storage device to speed up the hard disk with the normal data behind it and the ceph recommendation to use 10GbE NICs.
The HoneyComb LX2 has 4 built in 10GbE ports, 16 A72 cores, actual DDR4 RAM slots, a 4 lane PCIe 3.0 m.2 slot and an open-ended (so you can put in a full x16 device) PCIe 3.0 slot with 8 lanes for a max of 8Gbyte/s bandwidth.
Since it's an arm box it's incredible energy efficient which is important since energy prices are increasing in my country. Also its the only affordable performant arm device at 800USD.
Since this setup has run incredible smooth so far, I plan on using SolidRun's HoneyComb LX2 as a ceph node with bigger disks and nvme write cache in the future. I looked at the raspberry pi 4, but was not too impressed by the single PCIe 3.0 lane, since I also plan on using NVME disks as ceph's metadata storage device to speed up the hard disk with the normal data behind it and the ceph recommendation to use 10GbE NICs.
The HoneyComb LX2 has 4 built in 10GbE ports, 16 A72 cores, actual DDR4 RAM slots, a 4 lane PCIe 3.0 m.2 slot and an open-ended (so you can put in a full x16 device) PCIe 3.0 slot with 8 lanes for a max of 8Gbyte/s bandwidth.
Since it's an arm box it's incredible energy efficient which is important since energy prices are increasing in my country. Also its the only affordable performant arm device at 800USD.