I see some say it’ll be fine. I’m not using a RPi3 for Storj, but I thought it wasn’t great especially because it doesn’t have much RAM?
As long as nodes work great and disk can keep up, it’s probably fine, otherwise it may face some memory issue I reckon.
Also less RAM means less cache usable by the OS to optimize process executions, and more swap used which wears off the SD card (unless booted from another drive).
I’m using a RPi4 (4gb RAM, swap disabled) for 6 nodes and it works great and uses only 400-ish MB of RAM when the network is quiet. But it can go up to 800MB when things are more active, or even higher if a disk stalls (but at that point, if the disk doesn’t recover soon enough all the ram could get eaten up until the OOP killer stops the node process - this is not likely to happen with a CMR disk I suppose).
From my experience that’s totally true. On my setup, 2.5" disks have poor performances and take ages to run the filewalker when nodes restart + they regularly cause a lot of io/wait. And for the same capacity, they are more expensive than 3.5" drives.
I have only one 3.5" drive dedicated to Storj, and it works way better. It draws more power and is noisy though. But considering how much more space it can store, it’s quite energy efficient per TB when fully utilized.
Just make sure you choose a case with a power switch that stays mecanically ON so it restarts in case of power outage.
I have this one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B078K4SCLM?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
Not sure that’s what you’re expecting but… ^^’ there it is: