I own several external 2.5’’ HDDs on the 1 TB range where I save my data. Samsung has worked well for me, but now I need more space.
One option would be to buy an external SSD instead of HDD.
Another would be to get an external NVME, but so far I haven’t found cases for them.
Nowadays we even have 1 TB flash drives, should I get one of these instead?
I could also buy 2 0.5 TB micro SD cards instead.
So many options make it difficult to decide.
What brands and technologies do you recommend?
Software is going to be debian based.
You must log in or register to comment.
WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.
Entirely depends if you count HGST as Western Digital or not, because they by far dominate the back blaze reliability scoreboards. IronWolf don’t even come close and are extremely hit or miss depending on capacity.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
ASUSTOR has NAS that can have up to 12 NVME SSDs (but speed is very limited by PCIE lanes).
NVME SSDs are still very expensive compares to HDD.
NAS that have many HDD bays are expensive but designed for easy setup and easy management.
Fractal Design Define 7 (XL) can have up to 18 HDDs by design, but then you will need to search for PCIE to SATA cards and PSU that have many SATA connectors (for example RM850x/RM1000x) and Molex to SATA cables.
FSP CMT370 is a much cheaper case with up to 3.5" HDD *9 or 2.5" SSD *10 but it’s not on amazon, it probably doesn’t sell to western world.
SAS drive enclosures (and SAS cards) are also an option, but the cages might be very loud because they are designed for servers that also are very loud.
The cheapest you’ll find that is still pretty good for HDDs is serverpartdeals. They have recertified Seagate Exos X22 20TB drives with 2 year warranties for $215. They also offer new drives with the full 5 years, ofc. Exos can be a little loud, as with other enterprise drives. You’ll still need a way to read from it in case you don’t have a spare drive bay, too.
You could check out c/datahoarder. They should be able to tell you about brands, reliability, best practices …
Be careful if you buy a Samsung 8x0 SSD. They have long standing bugs that may cause data loss. They are worked around in the kernel, however you have to ensure that the workaround for your particular model exists in the kernel version you use.
HDDs last best when not moved, as they dont lose the data that much when you dont use them. But they turn around, 24/7. It is insane. They use lots of electricity, produce heat, noise, and wear out without you doing anything.
SSDs have little tear from just being connected to a machine, they just dont do much. To my knowledge they also last longer a lot of times. But they are not as good for permanent storage and should be connected to power every half year or so.
I would always go with normal SATA SSDs, cheap, cool, just work.
NVMEs are so damn hot, small, expensive, often I dont see the reason.
Don’t shout at them either. They don’t like that.
HDDs have moving parts and can break if handled boldly, yes. But other than that they are more durable. SSDs (no matter the port or protocol) are always limited in lifetime by the program-erase cycles of NAND flash. It’s a bit more involved, but maybe read up on what the Flash Translation Layer does, if you are interested. The gist is, that an SSD may only be fully rewritten a thousand or so times (depending on the quality of the flash) before it breaks.
SSDs are more expensive but have no sector-based search times and are faster.
Reliability can go bad for both sides. That’s why RAID exists.
Interesting. Yes for sure, the amount of writes over time is really important.
I find it crazy how HDDs can spin all the time, so damn fast. So I just generally dont trust them.
Like, 7200rpm, that is 3.784.320.000 (3,7 Billion) times a year. Just scary.
You should look at power settings. HDDs can power down when not being read from or written to. It extends the time you wait when you need the data on them but can save on their lifetime / electric / heat.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the lifetime - spinning up and spinning down put far more stress on the drive components than simply spinning at a constant rate.
Depends on how frequently you’re accessing the data. If it’s infrequently used, then spin up/down can be beneficial. But yes, you raise a good point. Thank you. :)
Buy from TrueNAS. They sell hardware.
