Advice for a newcomer

Hi all,
The idea of a Pi-powered sd card copied came to me today after I discovered the Gnarbox. I was very happy to discover this project and community!
I would like to ask you for “best practices” for a newcomer to the project:

  • Which Pi provides the best performance/power consumption tradeoff?
  • Does anyone have photos of a build with a Pi Zero? I wonder how all the adapters would fit in a neat enclosure. Is the single usb port on the Pi Zero a bottleneck. Iirc, the usb ports on Pi Bs are also on a single usb hub.
  • a screen is a must for me. What is the consensus on the best choice there?
  • what are recommended sd card readers to avoid data corruption. It would be a nightmare to corrupt the sd card while trying to back it up…

I also discovered the RAVPower FileHub and I have to say - for the price, it is one hell of a device! A DIY OSS project is always fun but for data critical handling the pre-made route might be safer. Has anyone tried it? Any impressions when compared to the LBB?

Cheers!