Late posting but I'll leave this here anyway. Mainly so I can point others as needed. Raspi is actually the answer. Use better sd cards. Or consider making the

Late posting but I'll leave this here anyway. Mainly so I can point others as needed. Raspi is actually the answer. Use better sd cards. Or consider making the root fs readonly and put the other changing data on usb external storage. Even an external harddisk. Give it the ability to turn other machines on/off as needed. I have a pi that is always on and orchestrates all sorts of little tasks. Some of them require plenty of writes. I havent burnt through a SD card yet. NFS/samba fs mounts to allow the pi to upload to a server. Etc. You'd be surprised how much just one pi can do. I certainly was.