I am in the EU. I want to help make the TOR network more robust by contributing a relay node. I have one of three hardware options: a raspberry pi zero W, raspberry pi 4B, or ThinkPad T470s.
In your practical experience, which of these computers would be the best for the network? As I understand, beyond a point, the CPU power doesn’t matter unless massive traffic loads go through the node.
P.S: Not sure if this is relevant, but I currently have a pihole hosted in a separate RPI zero. I plan to host this at home. I do not have a separate connection line. My router doesn’t support vlan.
Add: Thank you for the kind replies. Based on the feedback, it think I’m currently not setup to help the network. I will instead continue with my annual contribution.
I will look into hosting a node on a VPS and just pay a monthly subscription fee or something.
Host a middle node
Keep in mind that none of the hardware you listed is great for hosting. It could work but I would go for somethinga little more modern. Something like a i5-7500 would be great. Get a router with vlans since you probably will want to segment the network.
For networking make sure you have a solid low latency reasonable bandwidth connection. I would do gigabit fiber since that will provide a decent amount of bandwidth while having low latency.
Also you could look into running a i2p node on the same machine since they both need volunteers.