Has anyone connected an external usb 3.0 hard drive to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with freedombox? Doesn’t it cause to overheat?
What kind of hard drive? Do you mean flash drive?
Does the case the Pi is in have a fan or heat sinks installed?
Honestly I really don’t think the FreedomBox software should be causing heat issues on a Pi 3B+.
No, I’m not talking about a flash drive, I’m talking about an external hard drive. The usb 3.0 flash drive warms the raspberry pi, so I use a usb 2.0 flash drive. The question is whether the Raspberry will overheat with an external usb 3.0 hard drive. My Raspberry does not have a fan.
USB 3.0 has about ten times the data transfer speed of 2.0. Your computer doesn’t get as warm sending data over 2.0 because the CPU doesn’t have to work as hard to keep up with the relatively slow transfer speed.
Transferring data over a 3.0 bus will heat up the computer pretty much the same with a flash drive, hard drive, or whatever because it is the work the CPU is doing that is causing it to warm up. If anything, a hard drive will heat the unit more because it will draw more electricity through the unit (especially with spinning rust, vs SSD).
The Freedombox software isn’t especially demanding on it’s own and can certainly run on your machine without a fan, but if you want to do larger data writes over a 3.0 bus then you might want to get a case with a fan.
Here’s one on eBay for twelve bucks:
By the way, Merry Christmas!
Thank you! Happy New Year! 