Hello, it’s me again. I read a lot about how unreliable micro SD cards are if you use your RPi to selfhost some stuff. Now I wanted to ask if some of you might have recommendations for cheap but reliable external SSDs. I did some research on Amazon but there are some brands I never heard before (Intenso, SSK, Netac, etc.) and don’t know if they can be trusted.

  • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
    101·
    3 months ago

    I’m using a couple of cheap Kingston A400 for my setup (120 and 480 GB) and they work just fine. One thing I noticed is that the 120 GB one’s health went down to 92%, from 100%, in “just” one year (smart parameter). But that’s implies a lifetime of more that 12 years, so I’m not excessively concerned.

    EDIT: of course, just after writing this comment the smaller SSD began to behave strangely (errors in dmesg).

        • theorangeninja@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Thank you, I think I will go with this and a SSD from crucial to start off and then add some HDDs for backup and NAS. Do you think this kind of enclosure is reliable enough for a NAS? And is there enough airflow if you add two 3.5" HDDs together in the dock station?

      • paf@jlai.luEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I’m not 100% sure but this might also depend which OS you are running on your pi. Did change from SD card to SSD few years back for my home assistant setup (now running with a mini pc) at the time I went for a geekpi adapter (can’t recall exact model).

        Try a quick ducduck search “sata adapter #yourOS#” and see if a list come up. Here is one for HA (but surely more models are compatible than the ones listed here) https://community.home-assistant.io/t/working-usb-enclosures-and-adapters-with-hassos/212763

        Edit: as for SSD, I went for Samsung EVO model

        Sidenote: all SSD will be more reliable than a sd card because they are less sensitive to rewrite counts

      • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
        21·
        3 months ago

        I have a couple of no-brand SATA-USB enclosers with some jmicron chipset. Can’t remember the exact chipset right now, as my RPi is not working ATM (see edit).

    • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Is there a one-line command to check my SSD? I have a headless setup. When I’ve tried on the past there was more results coming back than I knew what to do with.

    • khorak@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Crucial is fine but IIRC the 1TB+ variants are too good to be true (cheap) and will die quite fast. Just a note for everyone to look into the underlying technology on the particular model.

    • theorangeninja@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I stumbled upon the Crucial BX, do you think that one is not reliable enough? Because I think I use that in my PC atm and it runs fine. But it’s not a home server so there is probably less load on this one.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    Buy used Samsung mSata or m.2 2230 drives on fleaBay. Stick with Samsung and other well known brands with decent spec sheets and warranties, that’s the cheapest way to handle durable storage on a pi. USB enclosures are like $5-7 on AliExpress or fleaBay.

    Buy MLC drives if you need higher endurance (check the model no and look up the datasheet.) TLC will usually be fine for a few years, MLC will last a bit longer. If you’re killing drives faster than you expect buy larger (512 instead of 256GB), blkdiscard the entire device once it’s installed and then only partition 60-80% of it. Never touch the rest of the freed storage and the drive controller should be able to use those blocks for wear levelling to reduce the NAND wear rate.

    Edit: One heads up, I usually buy used drives from eBay because their buyer protection is top tier, if there’s anything wrong with the drive when it’s delivered or when I test it it goes right back for a refund. This makes buying blind viable thanks to an easy return policy.

    If you’re sourcing used drives somewhere else insist on seeing SMART data before purchasing and don’t buy heavily worn drives. Look at the drive model datasheet, find the warranted endurance of the drive (if it’s a 512GB drive rated for 1 DWPD over 3y that means the rated endurance is ~ 0.5T * 365 * 3 or roughly ~550TB written over 3y. Pass on buying drives approaching their rated endurance, try to buy lightly used drives wherever possible and you shouldn’t have problems with reliability.

    • theorangeninja@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I heard it’s not so good practice to buy used drives so I will not do that for now but thanks for the second part I will consider that!

    • khorak@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Since you mentioned MLC, maybe you have some suggestions for eg used server grade disks? Would the Rpi be able to run something like the Intel datacenter SSDs eg S3700? The power loss protection is really something I would like to have, especially in a homelab scenario. Or any other notable MLCs with larger capacities? I am having trouble finding a good list sorted by max potential storage.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Most enterprise drives are TLC these days, MLC just doesn’t provide the storage density that enterprises require anymore. I only mentioned MLC because you’ll occasionally find mSATA drives in the <=256GB range that use MLC. You have to check the datasheet for each model, look for endurance rated at 5DWPD or higher, those will typically be MLC or heavily over provisioned TLC. If you want enterprise drives with greater endurance than the usual 0.5 or 1 DWPD look for the over provisioned models with capacities like 400GB, 800GB, 1.6T or 3.2T. those are 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB raw capacity drives with a bunch of flash set aside for wear leveling purposes. You don’t often see 300GB, 600GB, 1.2T or 2.4T drives anymore but those are often very high endurance (write intensive, 10 DWPD or so) models.

        Check the datasheets for drives when you’re shopping and you can get a pretty good idea of what their durability is like, I usually buy 1 DWPD drives for write occasional bulk storage and 3+ DWPD for anything with a serious write workload. You can also help the drive controller a bit by running blkdiscard against the entire device before partitioning, then only partition and use ~80% of available space. The drive controller will typically grab free unused blocks and use them for wear leveling but only if they’ve been marked free (TRIMmed) and never allocated after. If you can’t find or can’t afford high endurance drives you can usually buy a larger lower endurance drive and over provision it in this way to extend its lifespan.

        (The last time MLC flash was really common was back in maybe 2014-2015, some of the older Samsung pro drives like the 850/860 pro were built using MLC. Those had legendary real world endurance, I think they’d get up to 10+PB written before actually failing. It’s a shame they didn’t have PLP because they would have made good budget array storage if they did.)

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    51·
    3 months ago

    I’ve personally been using a Teamgroup 1tb from Amazon and a few KingSpec (from Aliexpress) 500gb SATA and PCIe M.2 drives for about a year and a half now without much problem or reported health loss. They are not performance winners of course but they still beat the pants off spinning rust.

    YMMV of course, always keeps backups or don’t keep anything you’d be super sad to lose on them.

    • theorangeninja@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      What does YMMV mean? And yeah sure, I just want to run the OS on the SSD and a few containers but the rest on HDDs and also backups on other HDDs.

      • Markaos@lemmy.oneEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another

  • inagy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    As the Pi can boot from USB, I wonder if anyone tried to use those “SSD in pendrive form factor” devices for this, eg. the Transcend ESD310S 512GB?

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    31·
    3 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
    SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
    SBC Single-Board Computer
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

    [Thread #925 for this sub, first seen 19th Aug 2024, 07:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Cole@midwest.socialEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Which Raspberry Pi do you have? There are some very reasonably priced M2 hats out there that you can boot from on the Pi 5, including the Raspberry Pi branded one.

    • theorangeninja@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      But an M.2 is usually more expensive than a normal 2.5" SSD. Is it better to boot from a M.2 HAT than from USB?