Well from my experiments running a full node, i noticed tremendous disk i/o activity during syncing, and significant even when up to date, for that very reason i wouldn't recommend it on non spinning magnetic media (ie. flash based storage) as it would quickly reduce its lifetime. Yes, specially for you raspi users, but a smartphone counts as well. Yes i know better flash devices last longer, do you really think your device has one of those latest generation quality flash storage? Even picking the good ones is difficult in m.2 or ssd factor, who even knows what your phone manufacturer used. And, regardless, it is a fact that each write reduces the lifetime of a flash storage device, you want to minimize to writes or use another type of media.
Better CPU and more RAM i guess is simply a matter of speed. With my slow 2ish mbps link that didn't made much difference anyway.
The Life Expectancy Of A SSD Is Based On Write Cycle
Most Of Bitcoin Node Operation Is Reading(When Verifying Block), Not Writing, Therefore Node Activity Wouldn't Significantly Affect Your Storage Lifetime
However, If You Running A Node With Low RAM(Smartphone/Raspberry Pi/Potato PC), Write Cycle Will Increase, Therefore Shortening Your Strorage Lifetime.
Plenty Of Smartphone Today Have 6-8 GB RAM
With low dbcache, the UTXO set is continuously rewritten on disk, at a much faster rate in general than blocks.
The larger you make the dbcache, the fewer disk writes are needed.
#RAMMatters
Smartphone Will Be A Viable Device For Running Node In The Future