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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| NAS | Network-Attached 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 |
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Look for log2ram on a LLM.
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
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.
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.
Okay and what about longevity of the drives? That should just depend on the number of writes, right?
Do you want reliable, or do you want cheap? You must choose 1 from that list.
If you’re not planning on putting anything critical on it and you’re doing backups, and you don’t mind being without its use for however long it would take you to replace it if it dies, pick anything.
I’ve never had an SSD die on me Yet but I don’t buy cheap brands though I don’t buy top of the range and I usually buy at a good deal. Crucial MX has been reasonably priced in the past.
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.
Don’t have much personal experience with BX but they’re probably fine. But once you have backups of anything you care about the worst that can happen is you need to restore those backups. If its running a service you can’t do without then maybe a backup pi?
I have RPis running on SD cards for years with no issues so realistically you probably won’t have any either but better to be prepared than not. And it also means that if you mess something up you can restore it to when it worked.
