I thought because a SSD is more stable as a uSDcard. But I've found a 32GB sandisk which will do for the moment.
The rootfs on uSD is rock solid. If you want storage, add a USB SSD. If you do not need storage, don't bother. Default rootfs on uSD is ~100 MiB. That is plenty but if needed you can scale it.
If you're worried about durability of the uSD card (a common concern on the Pi), then rest easy. When OpenWrt is running normally, it does not write anything to disk as all logging is to memory-based files. Of course you write disk files when you're changing configs, updating and installing software, but once set up, you don't have to worry about drive wear.
I have several uSD cards from before 2016 running Arch ARM on RPi models to this day. Must have thousands of read-write cycles without any damage or corruption. If you do get a bad uSD card eventually, reinstalling OpenWrt is soooo easy.
- Reimage new uSD card
- Restore the oh so convenient backup tarball of your settings
If you're messing around with external SSDs and if you have no need for extra storage beyond what you can do with a cheaper and easier to use uSD card, you're making your life more complex.
There are also high endurance SD cards that are supposed to be more tolerant to being written...
I've been using the same Transcend 2GB SD (note, not uSD, so older) in my RPi1B since day one,
and I was one of the 1st people to receive the RPi.
It runs 24/7, monitors my boiler. running regular Linux, hence more writes are taking place.
It's been roughly 12 years, no issues so far.
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Hello, I've already decided to stay with an uSDcard. I'm waiting for my external USB--> RJ45 adapter.
Which graphical software do you advise for monitoring network traffic?
Thanks for all the replies.
nlbwmon or collectd? LuCI has some built ins.
@darksky's correct, how much of a graph nerd are you, really ?
(nope, there's no monitorix package in openwrt)
I had collectd on mine for while but found that I rarely looked it... same with nlbwmon.
Yepp, it can however be interesting when problems show up to look at say CPU usage or ping results.
I’m writing a post on my blog on how to obtain a full report via mail of your hardware and network data, few days and it will be online, the final result is
This from a webpage
And this is the daily pdf/report (obviously it’s customizable)
I’m getting it also from my Weather Station and Pi-hole
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For monitoring, I tend to be more interested in seeing trends over time than instantaneous loads. It's helpful for answering the inevitable question: "Has it always been like this?"
To that end, I use https://munin-monitoring.org/ to good effect.
It's older (runs on PERL) and not as much eye-candy as the newer stuff, but it was originally designed by and for network engineers who needed to know at a glance if something was overloaded.
It presents as a webpage, so with a few clicks you can be seeing anything from today's numbers to a year-long trendline for a large number of system stats.
You can use Grafana for retrieve stats every day/week/month/year…
Indeed I’m using 3 reports day/week/month and your point is exactly why I thought about a pdf report automatically delivered to my inbox.
…the incipit of the article I’m writing is:
I spent the last few days in a long -but cool- project: a way to receive the stats of my home network, my Netatmo Weather Station, my Pi-Hole ads blocked, my servers hardware, etc…from my Grafana server delivered automatically to my inbox every $number of day/hour (usually every 24h or every week and month).
Why? Because the stats that Grafana builds are beautiful and they’re very useful if you give a glance at them regularly, in order to understand your habits and what is changing in your environment. But after few weeks of “hype” I totally forgot to see them. And this makes those beautiful dashboards, well almost useless, or less useful and interesting.
FYI: As I mentioned before, I've ordered the TP-link RJ-45 interface and as part of a hobby/work, I wanted to use a RP4 as monitoring device. It would be nice to learn. But a second reason for monitoring is, an acquaintance of me, is sure, his texts he prints, are sent over the internet to somebody who's the 'almighty'. Other than that, he's a nice guy but has weird fantasies. Therefore I would like a graphical interface who monitors in and outgoing traffic. I've seen lots of X86 devices with graphical monitoring software but I'm not investing lots of euros to prove somebody else his faults. The RP4 is redundant at the moment.
Have a great weekend.
This CM4 carrier board from DFRobot has two Gigabit ports with the second on the PCIe lane
If I could just get my hands on a CM4...
If money is no object, buy a seeedstudio cm4 router. They always seem to be in stock and come with a decent cm4
Sure, it has dual nic but one is usb, so, not suitable for gigabit internet
Not sure about seeedstudio's USB ethernet, but USB3 allows gigabit ethernet...
Oh, it's a gigabit ethernet device
but you won't get gigabit speed .. .maybe 700mbit - as opposed to 930+ on the DFRobot
I also forgot to mention, you also buy a dfrobot router board - they don't come with the CM4
That's what I did, bought the seedstudio just because it was the only way I could get a CM4 in a timely manner 
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