Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?
I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now), after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't happen on the other USB ports.
Well, AMD makes a good core but there are reasons that Intel is preferred by some users in some applications, and one of those reasons is that the peripheral devices on Intel platforms tend to work.