Fair enough.I tend to run headless and command line (without auto login) but I usually install full fat RPiOS and disable booting to the desktop. Why? Because shops around here don't seem to stock anything smaller than 32GB cards so plenty of free space, having the desktop installed but not running doesn't impact performance, and it's a lot simpler to have it and disable it than it is to find you need it later and have to install it (just search the forum for folks having problems after starting with lite and are now trying to install the desktop).Not large at all. For a NAS I'd run "headless" with the Lite version of the OS (no GUI). That should fit on a 16GB card quite easily. Possibly even an 8GB card, but that would be a bit tight.
I try to keep my install sizes down for a number of reasons. Build time is faster. More free space supposedly helps the wear levelling on the card and make sit last longer. It is quicker to back up and takes up less space on my backup server.
The smallest card I've used is 16MB on a Pi 1B with some bare metal code. I have used 2GB cards for a Lite OS. Currently I'm using from 8GB to 64GB cards, plus various SSDs and HDDs up to 2TB.The smallest capacity cards I'm currently using are 16GB but I have had a 1B booting from as little as 2GB though that was kinda cheating. One used a tiny buildroot customised OS image, the other just had bootcode.bin on the SD card with everything else on a USB stick.
Statistics: Posted by rpdom — Mon Apr 15, 2024 6:52 am