My Orange Pi Zero adventure and solution.

[andrzejs]

Hello all,
I bought this OPZ, it was cheap and I was curious. Primarily for a yet-another-headles-server-without-wifi. I am used to different hardware and Debian since "the days You compiled Linux kernel in just 48 hours". I read quite a lot about OPZ and different OS solutions - You have quite a few weeks before You get Your parcel from China to Your mailbox in Sweden. My first SD card I bought from China, it was Kingston 16GB class 10 an all of that. Worked like charm in couple of hours then after reboot it was unreadable. I spent days in search for solution, tried to reformat it in different ways  on different machines and using different OS and software combination. The card was dead - warm but unreadable. The second card I bought here locally, SanDisk it was, came home in just a couple of days.

Meanwhile I found an old SD card in my no-longer-used smartphone. Just 2 GB but a minimal DietPi  fitted allright. This one worked fine and took much beating up. Writing, rewriting, reformatting, testing, rebooting - You name it.

So I took my new SanDisk card and fired it up. Just like the Kingston one it took couple of hours before this one died too. WTF!?? - I thought. There will be no more new SD cards for this OPZ!! That is how I found this forum and signed in. In just a couple of hours i learned about Armbian´s ability to boot from different media. For my OPZ the only reasonable option was to boot it from the 2 GB card of mine and place the root filesystem on the tiny USB stick i had in one of my drawers. Tested the stick for read and write speed, it was much faster than any of the SD cards I had available. Now the system is up and running 24/7 in a couple of weeks and everything is fine, it seems the SD card as boot media is OK.

I have found one old graphic card with an aluminum heatsink, cut out a suitable bit of it for CPU, glued it with the few drops of ancient blue thermal grease i had. It runs 10 degrees cooler than before and I am satisfied. I still have one tiny fan from another graphic card - it would seat on top of the white enclosure with some extra drilled holes if needed.

With the new versions of OPZ it is even easier to run it without the SD cards and my advice would be: forget those little ridiculous bits of plastic and use some of that stuff  You have in Your drawer instead!

Thank You for the inspiration and help, my problem would not be solved without You.