Submitted 2 months ago by theorangeninja@lemmy.today to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
Just stick to the brands with multi-year warranties.
For example? Kingston, Crucial?
Have a look here: backblaze.com/…/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-s…
I’ve never had a single problem with Crucial, Seagate, WDC. I’ve had a few issues with Seagate 990 Pros having issues, though it was later made known that Samsung had some bad batches out in the world. Hopefully that is not the case anymore.
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.
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
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.
What about enclosures from Sabrent? That should be a reliable manufacturer, no?
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Crucial is fine. It’s commonly found in corporate and government workstations.
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.
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.
Your mileage may vary
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?
Happy cake day!
Is cake day even a thing on day zero? Haha… thanks! :)
Jeff Geerling ran some benchmarks on USB storage options in 2020, including a pen drive SSD: jeffgeerling.com/…/fastest-usb-storage-options-ra…
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.
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?
M.2 would technically be the best performance available, but realistically I don’t think you’d notice the difference over a USB SSD. Maybe a few extra seconds on boot.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
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Look for log2ram on a LLM.
Could you elaborate?
Log2ram is a service which keeps your log files in RAM, avoids the constant writes to disk and really helps with SDcard longevity. Probably helps with SSDs too.
You can just Google it and check out the github page, no need for LLM accuracy lottery
Samsung T7 totally worth every cent. You connect it via USB-C.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 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.
theorangeninja@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Are you using SATA to USB adapters? If yes, which one work well?
thayer@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
You can go with something like this if you want a clean solution.
I use a drive dock station for my backup drives, and I have a few of these for one-offs too.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 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).
paf@jlai.lu 2 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) community.home-assistant.io/t/…/212763
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 2 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.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 months ago
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX should do the job