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!
Comment on Cheap but reliable external SSD for RPis
seaQueue@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Buy used Samsung mSata or m.2 2232 drive on fleaBay. Stick with Samsung and other well known brands with decent spec sheets and warranties. That’s the cheapest way to handle storage on a pi. USB enclosures are like $5-7 on AliExpress or fleaBay.
theorangeninja@lemmy.today 1 month ago
khorak@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month 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.world 1 month 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 occasionally bulk storage and 3+ DWPD for anything with a serious write workload. You can also help the drive ve 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, 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 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.)
khorak@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Legend, thank you!
Peffse@lemmy.world 1 month ago
whoa whoa, I would not recommend a cheap AliExpress USB enclosure at all. As others have already pointed out there’s a whole ever-growing blacklist of partially incompatible enclosures that basically flake out whenever they feel like it. Worse yet, not every device is on the list so you frequently have to research and add devices yourself.
The last generic Inland m.2 enclosure I bought worked fine… for 1 hour. Then it disconnected and reconnected. I thought it was just random chance, until it happened again and again and again. Did the deep-dive research, found the chipset was partially incompatible and I had to return it.
DO NOT BUY CHEAP ENCLOSURES FOR EXTERNAL MEDIA ON RPI
seaQueue@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My approach to this has always been to buy one enclosure and validate it, then go buy like 8 more after thorough testing. Obviously don’t place an order for 10 units of an unknown tech item from AliExpress or you’re looking at a bad time. Look for enclosures that use known good chipsets and there’s not as much risk as you’re expecting. I have something like 8 msata enclosures here that work flawlessly and another half dozen sata+nvme rtl9210b enclosures that also work well.
theorangeninja@lemmy.today 1 month ago
What about enclosures from Sabrent? That should be a reliable manufacturer, no?
Peffse@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations I can give you as each enclosure could use a different chipset. It seems that the brand does not have a good reputation for compatibility but that list is fairly old at this point. All I can say is if you find an enclosure you like, plug the model number into the raspberry pi forum and see if anybody had to add it to the quirks list.