Maybe you see a usecase that would see someone without knowledge or equipment need tons of cheap storage in a single desktop pc?
Personally I have 4 TB and some in the PC, and it’s almost full. a few VMs, a couple of snapshots, music because I prefer a local player over jellyfin, almost all programs that I didn’t want to keep on my small SSD, and a bunch of other data.
I know someone who wanted to save his dashcam recordings to his PC. I could not get him to tell why does he want it, and figure out if it would be important enough to get a big drive, but currently he can only store 2 days of recordings on the SSD. People around me are often on a tight budget, and I didn’t want to buy him an SSD unnecessarily big (before I got to know he wants to do this…), both for the cost and the lower lifespan
because I prefer a local player over jellyfin
I used vlc then mpv for years before setting up jellyfin. I could still use them if I wanted to.
For internet access, the largest of files (~30Mbit/s) came up against my upload limit, but locally still played snappily.
Scrubbing through files was as snappy as playing off of my ssd.
I do understand wanting music locally. I sync my music locally to my phone and portable devices too so I’m not dependent on internet connectivity. None of these devices even support hdds however, for my pc I see no reason not to play off of my nas using whatever software I prefer.
I didn’t want to buy him an SSD unnecessarily big […] for the lower lifespan
Larger ssds almost always have higher maximum writes. If you look at very old (128 or 256GB drives from 2010-2015 ish) or very expensive drives you will get into higher quality nand cells, but if you are on a budget you can’t afford the larger ones and the older ones may have 2-3 times the cycles per cell but like a tenth the capacity, so still 1/3rd the total writes.
The current price optimum to my knowledge is 2TB SSDs for ~85USD with TLC up to 1.2PBW, so about 600 cycles. If you plan on a lifetime of 10 years, that is 330GB per day, or 4GB/day/USD. I can’t even find SLC on the market anymore (outside of 150USD 128GB standalone chips), but I have never seen it close to that price per bytes written. (If you try looking for slc ssds, you will find incorrectly tagged tlc ssds, with tlc prices and lifetime. That is because “slc cache” is a common ssd buzzword).
I didn’t want to buy him an SSD unnecessarily big […] for the cost
Another fun thing about HDDs is that they have a minimum price, since they are large bulky chunks of metal that are inherently hard to manufacture and worth their weight in materials.
That lower cutoff seems to be around 50USD, for which you can get 500GB or 2TB at about the same price. 4TB is sold for about 90USD.
In terms of price, ignoring value just going for the cheapest possible storage, there is never a reason to by an HDD below 2TB for ~60USD. A 1TB SSD has the same price as a 1TB HDD, below that SSDs are cheaper than HDDs.
So unless your usecase requires 2TB+, SSDs are a better choice. Or if it needs 1TB+ and also has immensely high rewrite rates.
a few VMs, a couple of snapshots
I have multiple complete disk images of various defunct installs, archived on my nas. That is a prime example for stuff to put into network storage. Even if you use them, loading them up would be comparable in speed to doing it off of an HDD.
for music what I use is AIMP. I only hope it can work with wine because I don’t want to run a VM for it
So unless your usecase requires 2TB+, SSDs are a better choice. Or if it needs 1TB+ and also has immensely high rewrite rates.
that’s good to know, it’ll keep this in mind. thanks!
I have multiple complete disk images of various defunct installs, archived on my nas. That is a prime example for stuff to put into network storage. Even if you use them, loading them up would be comparable in speed to doing it off of an HDD.
does this also stand for when shares are done with SMB? I’m mostly worried about random access there being worse than with a local HDD
Smb should be fine. I used it for years on my primary systems (I moved to sshfs when I migrated to linux finally), and it wasn’t ever noticeably less performant than local disks.
Compared to local ntfs partitions anyway, ntfs itself isn’t all that fast in file operations either.
If you are looking at snapshots or media, that is all highly sequential and low file operations anyway. Something like gaming off of a nas via smb does also work, but I think you notice the lag smb has. It might also be iops limitations there.
Large filesizes and highly random fast low-latency reads is a very rare combination to see. I’d think swap files, game assets, browser cache (usually not that large to be fair).
For anything with fewer files and larger changes it always ran at over 100MiB/s for me until I exhausted the disk caches, so essentially the theoretical max accounting for protocol losses.
for music what I use is AIMP. I only hope it can work with wine because I don’t want to run a VM for it
I use that on android. Never knew there were desktop versions, odd that it supports android but not other linux.
Wine is very reliable now, it will almost certainly work out of the box.
Otherwise there are also projects to run android apps on linux, though no doubt at much more effort and lower chance of success than wine.
