Best external SSD for high-uptime use?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of an external SSD that’d last me a while being plugged into my incredibly simple SBC home server. I’ve done a bit of research but haven’t found much information about USB-connected SSDs and their longevity in terms of 24/7 use.

Some More Specifics What I’m aiming to do is use this drive as NAS that I can access on my home network, it’d mostly be used for syncing backups from devices, but would also probably get use as a general-purpose file storage solution. Basically, it’s going to be plugged into my little Raspberry Pi all the time, but will only be used sporadically and generally won’t be writing huge amounts of data at a time.

Given the above information, are there any external SSDs you could recommend for this application? Or am I worrying too much and should just buy your average Samsung/Kingston/WD/Seagate etc.?

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Comments

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cesium@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
TBH, you should just buy an internal SSD and pair it with a USB adapter.

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- Kaldo@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Any specific reason why?
  
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  - cesium@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    For one, they are generally cheaper than your usual external drive. They usually last longer, too.
    
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  - Pulp@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Enclosure and NVMe are cheaper than internal and probably of better quality.
    
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Magiccupcake@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Your best bet is probably to make your own.

Find a high quality NVMe drive and put it in a USB enclosure.

If the USB ports or anything other than the drive fail, the data is easily recoverable.

Given your use case, buying an external drive is probably fine, just don’t get one from SanDisk.

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- kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Oh yeah definitely, after that mess I don’t feel comfortable getting anything more than little flash drives from them. Thanks for the idea!
  
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- nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Why not SanDisk?
  
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  - Magiccupcake@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Recent controversy over an absurdly high failure rate.
    
    theverge.com/…/sandisk-extreme-pro-portable-my-pa…
    
    Might be fixed now, but i wouldn’t gamble.
    
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DynamoSunshirtSandals@possumpat.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve been running a setup much like this for a year and a half now. I ended up buying a Samsung T5 2TB USB drive and plugging it into my RPi 4. Works amazingly, performance is ideal. And there’s even a way to boot from a USB SSD if you want to avoid SD card wear.

Why the T5 and not a higher tier SSD? Turns our the T7 and higher chips only benefit from speeds if you’ve got a thunderbolt port, consume a lot of extra power, and generate a ton of extra heat. The T5 will hopefully hold up better over time since it’s almost always cool to the touch. Performance has not been an issue.

Of course, you could also look into SBC with built-in PCIe ports and plug an SSD right in.

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rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There is one wrinkle: Some USB->SATA chips/enclosures/adapters are "bad" in that they don't fully implement the latest specs, as described here: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=245931

These can be worked-around by using the "older" usb-storage drive, but that may need to be manually enabled.

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- LufyCZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’d personally raise the min. storage to 2TB, SSDs are too cheap nowadays
  
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  - rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Fair enough. Cheap is relative, price-per-GB is still cheaper for spinning rust and where exactly to draw the line is entirely personal.
    
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- tarjeezy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Somewhat related, I’m so annoyed that my USB 3.0 SATA adapter doesn’t pass S.M.A.R.T. data. Didn’t even think to check for such a deficiency. Just another thing to watch out for when buying these adapters.
  
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xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
high uptime, doesn’t many anything.

SSDs are rated by how much data can be written to them, as flash as finite write-endurance.

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

NAS Network-Attached Storage

NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage

SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

[Thread #153 for this sub, first seen 21st Sep 2023, 05:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
A NAS is a standalone device that uses low power and solves your problem, but is expensive (synology, openNAS etc) an external drive is not a NAS it’s an offline backup (a worthy thing, and perhaps your priority for data integrity / an actual backup). As Asked, get an external USB3 caddy for drives and any well reputed SSD, Crucial, Samsung ,etc…

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- kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ah right it seems I made the assumption that Network Attached Storage meant any storage attached to my networked device haha, thanks for the clarification. I like this idea, forgot about the option of USB drive caddies. Thank you!
  
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  - Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Which is kinda correct.
    Set your SBC up to run something like TrueNas or OMV6 and you have a DIY NAS.
    
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Fewer Letters	More Letters
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage