I’m new to this stuff so go easy on me.
So I want to get into selfhosting, and I’ve decided to get a Raspberry Pi 5. I plan to attach drives to it, from about 500GB-1TB. I’m on a budget, preferably under $100.
I want to host these things:
- A personal lemmy instance
- A samba server, to store files and backups
- A mail server
- A few other light docker containers
I was wondering whether I should get an SSD or an HDD for these. Lemmy would probably like an SSD because it uses Postgres, but an HDD would be better for storage since I get more GB per dollar.
What should I go with?
First things first, unless you are strictly mailing yourself or you plan on having discussions with google/microsoft/apple… dump the mail Idea, Trust me it’s not worth it and probably won’t work.
Second for what you want almost everything will be held in ram and the drive won’t matter except boot time, I say almost because you want a samba server so the question quickly becomes how much data do you have and how much money are you willing to spend. I would make the argument that the boot drive should always be ssd but the rest is a matter of patience and money
TLDR: don’t bother with Email, boot is ssd and reset hdd unless you’re rich or not much data.
For running apps? SSD. For large amounts of data storage? HDD.
Why not split the difference and do both. Hdd for storage and SSD for services/containers. To help with the power load/performance hit I’d recommend using a usb to sata adapter that has external power. Overall though it sounds like a micro optipl x would be great for you. They’re cheap, more powerful, but still sip power, and usually can fit nvme and 2.5" drives together.
couple of old 2.5 HDD + usb to SATA converter. But Pi5 is hardly suitable to host anything. May just get old PC (which gives you HDD too). There are plenty for < $100 or even free. But you are going to pay more for power.
I have Nextcloud running on a Pi4 and it runs like a charm. It has a lot of RAM and processing power to spare, actually. The good thing about arm mini computers is the exceptionally low power draw. You can’t achieve that with some old x86 PC.
I second this.
I have a nextcloud instance on pi4 for personal use and love it.
It’s not good for live transcoding of video, but works great for calendars, file sharing, photo sharing and music streaming.
I have a 500 gig SSD for most stuff and a 6TB HDD for backups and archiving.
I use docker compose to map a folder called archive in my instance to the HDD.
You can get an older model Samsung Evo 1tb SSD new for under $100. Those have been good drives for me.
You can probably find something to shuck used if you don’t care too much for reliability.
Regardless, get a second disk even something attached to your main PC to handle backups.
RPi are nice, but imo are getting expensive and if you aren’t using the i/o pins just not worth it. If I were to just start out again I’d pickup a used laptop. Higher specs than a RPi and built in battery backup.
