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For Pi Day, I'm going to livestream my second attempt at getting 16 hard drives (well, 12 hard drives and 4 SSDs) recognized by a Raspberry Pi.

The first attempt went decently well... but I wound up running into power supply issues.

This time around, I will hopefully have those issues solved, and also we may have a little fun building a software-RAID-on-hardware-RAID (depending on how crazy we want to get). It probably won't work like I expect, but that's what makes it fun!.

Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects.

You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but... well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling mess and lose bandwidth and latency to a USB-to-SATA or USB-to-NVMe adapter.

The Pi 4 actually has an x1 PCI Express gen 2.0 lane, but the USB 3.0 controller chip populates that bus on the model B. The Compute Module 4, however doesn't presume anything—it exposes the PCIe lane directly to any card it plugs into.

And in the case of Oratek's TOFU, it's exposed through an M.2 slot, making this board the first one I've used that can accept native NVMe storage, directly under the Pi:

It makes me throw up a little in my mouth to say this, because it's such a YouTuber thing to do... but I now have an official merch store to go along with my YouTube channel:

The Red Shirt Jeff store has original designs that I find interesting or funny, and there are three shirt designs available at launch:

• It has been 0 days since I recompiled the Linux kernel (also available in a Women's version).
• Release the Magic Smoke
• Hard Drive & RAID-Z2

A few months ago, I posted a video titled Enterprise SAS RAID on the Raspberry Pi... but I never actually showed a SAS drive in it. And soon after, I posted another video, The Fastest SATA RAID on a Raspberry Pi.

Well now I have actual enterprise SAS drives running on a hardware RAID controller on a Raspberry Pi, and it's faster than the 'fastest' SATA RAID array I set up in that other video.

A Broadcom engineer named Josh watched my earlier videos and realized the ancient LSI card I was testing would not likely work with the ARM processor in the Pi, so he was able to send two pieces of kit my way:

Early this year, I passed a major milestone on my YouTube channel—100,000 subscribers!

I've had a channel since 2006, but never really devoted time to it until last year, and I'm blown away by the positive response I've gotten publishing videos on Raspberry Pi, Kubernetes, Ansible and more.

To celebrate the milestone, I created a 'how it's made' video where I go behind the scenes and show how I made—from start to finish—my Argon One M.2 Raspberry Pi Case review video.

Early in 2020, I kicked off the Ansible 101 live streaming series. I wrote an Ansible 101 retrospective post and decided to give it another go, this time covering Kubernetes.

Starting late in 2020 and wrapping things up today, I streamed a new 10-episode series, Kubernetes 101 (the first episode is embedded below).

I didn't know it at the time, but my results testing the EDUP WiFi 6 card (which uses the Intel AX200 chipset) on the Raspberry Pi in December weren't accurate.

It doesn't get 1.34 gigabits of bandwidth with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 like I stated in my December video, WiFi 6 on the Raspberry Pi CM4 makes it Fly!.

I'm very thorough in my benchmarking, and if there's ever a weird anomaly, I try everything I can to prove or disprove the result before sharing it with anyone.

In this case, since I was chomping at the bit to move on to testing a Rosewill 2.5 gigabit Ethernet card, I didn't spend as much time as I should have re-verifying my results.

A few months ago, I replaced my Core i9 MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 8GB of RAM for a day, and I made a video and a blog post about the experience.

Obviously there's a vast difference between a new Core i9 laptop with 32 GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU, and a 2 terabytes of fast storage and a tiny Raspberry Pi running ARM. So it wasn't a fair fight, but I could do a lot of things well enough, and every generation of Pi has gotten better.

A few weeks ago, someone from Mindshare Management asked me if I'd like to do the same test, but this time with an almost one-for-one replacement laptop: the new Kubuntu Focus M2.

Review video: Check out the video that goes along with this review:

Last year, I wrote a blog post titled The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan.

And in a video to go along with that post, I detailed the process of drilling out a hole in the top of the official Pi 4 case and installing a 5v fan inside.

But that solution wasn't great. The fan was a little loud and annoying, and would stay on constantly. And who wants to damage the nice-looking Pi Case by putting a hole right in the top?

A week or so ago, I got the following email in my inbox:

Almost exactly one year ago, my GitHub Sponsors account was approved, and I issued a meek call to action:

You can now sponsor my open source work through GitHub Sponsors: https://t.co/h2GXLE9ZP6 #opensource