The external WD HDD, on the image, seems to draw it’s power from the Raspberry Pi 400, so I wonder if an SSD (obviously more expensive) would contribute significantly to keeping the whole topology cooler in the long run (besides boosting speed).
Yes, the Raspberry Pi 400 emerges out lesser heat when compared to previous models due to the thick aluminium sheet mounted on the back.
I did have a spare 480 GB Kingston SSD and but for some reason it wasn't working fast on the Raspberry Pi may be because of the low processor I guess.
I even tried installing the OS on the HDD directly but since I was booting through an external storage through USB port every time I move the Pi to use the keyboard the HDD used to get disconnected and the Pi used to freeze. Eventually I had to install the OS on the Micro SD card itself and everything is sorted.
Decent speed and the external storage is quite sufficient for more than 5 years from now to store the block data.
And I think that Pi 400 can also be overclocked to 2.2 GHz and give even better performance with slightly higher temperatures.
Yes we can overclock the Pi 400 to 2.2 GHz. So far there's no necessity for me to overclock. May be in future I might overclock it to 2 GHz still saving 0.2 GHz
I hope it's not off-topic, but I've seen second-hand older generation Intel NUC (I3-4010U/SSD 120GB/8GB DDR3) at 135$.
At this price, with SSD included, it looks to me a lot better than any RasPi, for this job. Am I missing something?
Yup, you are right. I could have also bought a second hand laptop with better configuration than Pi at the same cost of the whole setup.
But there's something about the Raspberry Pi. So far I am happy with the setup.