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.

12 points
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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.

EDIT: of course, just after writing this comment the smaller SSD began to behave strangely (errors in dmesg).

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5 points

Are you using SATA to USB adapters? If yes, which one work well?

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2 points
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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) https://community.home-assistant.io/t/working-usb-enclosures-and-adapters-with-hassos/212763

Edit: as for SSD, I went for Samsung EVO model

Sidenote: all SSD will be more reliable than a sd card because they are less sensitive to rewrite counts

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3 points

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.

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1 point

Yeah, I use something like this, a no-brand enclosure.

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1 point

Thank you, I think I will go with this and a SSD from crucial to start off and then add some HDDs for backup and NAS. Do you think this kind of enclosure is reliable enough for a NAS? And is there enough airflow if you add two 3.5" HDDs together in the dock station?

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2 points

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).

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2 points

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.

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2 points

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX should do the job

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1 point

Thank you, that worked!

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1 point

Is this command to check the health of the SSD/drive in general?

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4 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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5 points
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Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another

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-2 points

Look for log2ram on a LLM.

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1 point

Could you elaborate?

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6 points

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

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1 point

Thank you very much, this helped way more than the other comment!

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8 points

Just stick to the brands with multi-year warranties.

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5 points

For example? Kingston, Crucial?

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2 points

Have a look here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-stats-review/

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.

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2 points
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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

[Thread #925 for this sub, first seen 19th Aug 2024, 07:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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