Jeff GeerlingModify

These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller.

Many YouTube content creators, myself included, noticed something in early to mid-August: views were down.

After being on the platform since 2006 (though for me, not being a 'professional' YouTuber until about 5 years ago), I'm used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes.

But this was substantial.

I had 4 10/10 videos in a row, which is unprecedented. I mean, my content could just be terrible all the sudden, and I've lost all but my core audience. But there are other explanations. Especially when the exact same thing happened to a large number of my peers on YouTube.

I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf in 2025, my first 'new' car in 15 years. The above photo was taken by the dealership; apparently their social media team likes to post photos of all purchasers.

I test drove a Tesla in 2012, and quickly realized my mistake. No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never drove one of those) could match the feel of pressing the throttle on an electric.

I started out with a used minivan, which I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Olds that I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Camry that I bought before we had kids, when I had a 16 mile commute.

Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi.

I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My configuration for these Arm NASes is up on GitHub.

Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5.

A few years ago, I admit it was rare to find someone running Arm hardware more powerful than a Raspberry Pi in a homelab (or more serious) setting, outside of cloud providers running Ampere or custom Arm CPUs.

But as Pis and Rockchip boards have become more powerful (and efficient), and Apple's M-series silicon has become more interesting (the M4 mini being an excellent value proposition for a quiet, tiny server), and even Ampere Altra pricing coming down a bit since it's an 'old' server CPU now, still offering 64 or 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4... I don't think I'm weird in suggesting Arm is a viable platform for reliable, even powerful servers.

Even for storage.