Comment on Choosing a second drive for my home server
whysofurious@sopuli.xyz 1 month agoThanks for the detailed answer! :) Indeed, I read that I would be limited in storage size if choosing the internal option. That said I am not sure I will be using more than 4tb in the next months, considering also that I don’t have the need for 4k videos at the moment. Would it be a “waste” to just go for an internal ssd to start, and then upgrade to a larger hdd (external) in the future?
Also, sorry just to clarify, when you say
Make sure you’re not writing logs or anything like that to it, it should be on demand use only
Does downloading media to the drive still counts as a viable thing to do? And I guess the on demand use would be e.g. streaming.
fprawn@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sorry, on demand is not a good way to state this, it’s just how my weird mind thinks of things. By “on demand”, I mean, like you are actively using it to store something or view something. If you’re not intentionally doing something with it, the drive should be completely idle. That’s more of a target than a requirement, though. It’s a way to keep storage drives tidy and not littered with temporary cache files, or databases used to store runtime state by various services. It’s just a strategy I like to take, to keep bulk storage separated from the applications and services that use it.
Even if a usb drive is intended to be permanently attached, it should still be treated as a temporary component. The reason is so that if something happens and the drive is disconnected, it limits the disruption to the system. You lose your media and documents until it’s reattached, of course, but the computer keeps chugging along happily.
If you use it for writing log files, then its loss can disrupt those services (and also prevent the problem from being reported). Also it’ll be constantly making noise, which can be annoying.
That’s my reasoning, anyway, you might prefer it done differently.
whysofurious@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
No worries! I think I got what you meant, just wanted to make sure. I agree with you to separate storage from apps and systems, in this way if something goes wrong with the main drive (I think) I should also be able to restore the system and not lose any downloaded media or data.