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.?
Edit:
Thanks for the advice everyone, that was quick and helpful! The solution I’m gonna go with is a USB caddy/housing to hold a standard internal HDD, so hopefully this is helpful for anyone else in a similar place with a simple home server like mine.
TBH, you should just buy an internal SSD and pair it with a USB adapter.
Any specific reason why?
For one, they are generally cheaper than your usual external drive. They usually last longer, too.
I see, thanks. I’m still stuck in the mentality “the more parts there are, the easier for it to break” :P. Or that it’d affect the speed in some way
Agreed, but in this case the external drives have the same USB to SATA/M.2 adapter internally. So the amount of parts is the same, but they can be replaced individually.
Also, the seperate adapter can help reusing any other old internal drives. For example as an offsite backup.
Enclosure and NVMe are cheaper than internal and probably of better quality.
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I’m going go against the grain and recommend a spinning disk for your situation. Writing backups and serving files will likely be overkill with and ssd. Depending on your version of pi you might even saturate the USB bus before you get anywhere near the speed your ssd provides. I’ve been using WD 2.5” spinners on a pi for the very purposes you describe for years.
We are almost to the point where its the same cost for SSD. You can get an 8tb drive for $370 now and it won’t always be spinning and wasting 4-7W forever. For me, with high electricity costs, it was a no brainer to get a few of these and they will pay the difference within a year or two. I got them on sale for $320 each.
Yeah, fair point, I think this thing still has USB 2.0, so maybe a spinner is the way to go. Someone reminded me that USB drive caddies exist, so I think I’ll go with that and a hard disk, just to make it more flexible should I ever need to use the drive in another machine or replace it. Thanks for the help!
I can tell you from experience I have a Samsung T5 (500GB) that has over 95TB of writes over 5+ years to it and it’s only used up 17% of its spare blocks. The T7 which is the newer model is like $40, I’d just get one of those. They’re very reliable, I’ve bought a few and none of them have failed. The larger drives have more spare blocks and are even more resistant to writes.
Personally I would recommend a portable SSD, over a HDD as I’ve had several HDDs fail but never lost an SSD, BackBlaze backs this up with their total drive failure statistics being 2.5% for HDDs and under 0.5% for SSDs. Your real danger will be that a portable drive is guaranteed to get jostled and an SSD is far more resilient to that.
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.
Oh yeah definitely, after that mess I don’t feel comfortable getting anything more than little flash drives from them. Thanks for the idea!
Why not SanDisk?
Recent controversy over an absurdly high failure rate.
https://www.theverge.com/22291828/sandisk-extreme-pro-portable-my-passport-failure-continued
Might be fixed now, but i wouldn’t gamble.
My last 512gb ssd was dying more quickly than my oldest Samsung SSDs
Seems to not be a coincidence
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 (and leads to bad performance compared to good chips).
Personally I’ve had to try a couple of USB/SATA adapters until I found one that worked reliably (but that might have just been bad luck), but since then it works flawlessly.
My second RPi is in an Argo Eon case which (given it’s designed/advertised as a NAS case for the RPi) is using one of the “good” chips and I’ve never had an issue with it.
Last but not least: if you don’t need massive storage space, then I’d argue against spinning rust: they are more prone to failure, usually require more power and may even cause undesired noise. So if you don’t need >= 1TB, go with an SSD, they are cheap as dirt.
I’d personally raise the min. storage to 2TB, SSDs are too cheap nowadays
Fair enough. Cheap is relative, price-per-GB is still cheaper for spinning rust and where exactly to draw the line is entirely personal.
Value wise I’d say 2tb is the sweet spot, at least looking at the prices around here.
$48 / 2TB HDD $82 / 2TB NVMe SSD
yes it is almost double, but the ssd is most likely gonna last longer, suck up less electricity and is muuuuch faster to boot
so at least long-term, it might actually be cheaper
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.
high uptime, doesn’t many anything.
SSDs are rated by how much data can be written to them, as flash as finite write-endurance.
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.
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 PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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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…
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!
Which is kinda correct.
Set your SBC up to run something like TrueNas or OMV6 and you have a DIY NAS.
