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.
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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).
Are you using SATA to USB adapters? If yes, which one work well?
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.
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?
Yeah, I use something like this, a no-brand enclosure.
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).
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
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.
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX should do the job
Is this command to check the health of the SSD/drive in general?
Thank you, that worked!
YW 😄
Just stick to the brands with multi-year warranties.
For example? Kingston, Crucial?
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.
Buy used Samsung mSata or m.2 2230 drives on fleaBay. Stick with Samsung and other well known brands with decent spec sheets and warranties, that’s the cheapest way to handle durable storage on a pi. USB enclosures are like $5-7 on AliExpress or fleaBay.
Buy MLC drives if you need higher endurance (check the model no and look up the datasheet.) TLC will usually be fine for a few years, MLC will last a bit longer. If you’re killing drives faster than you expect buy larger (512 instead of 256GB),
blkdiscardthe entire device once it’s installed and then only partition 60-80% of it. Never touch the rest of the freed storage and the drive controller should be able to use those blocks for wear levelling to reduce the NAND wear rate.Edit: One heads up, I usually buy used drives from eBay because their buyer protection is top tier, if there’s anything wrong with the drive when it’s delivered or when I test it it goes right back for a refund. This makes buying blind viable thanks to an easy return policy.
If you’re sourcing used drives somewhere else insist on seeing SMART data before purchasing and don’t buy heavily worn drives. Look at the drive model datasheet, find the warranted endurance of the drive (if it’s a 512GB drive rated for 1 DWPD over 3y that means the rated endurance is ~ 0.5T * 365 * 3 or roughly ~550TB written over 3y. Pass on buying drives approaching their rated endurance, try to buy lightly used drives wherever possible and you shouldn’t have problems with reliability.
whoa whoa, I would not recommend a cheap AliExpress USB enclosure at all. As others have already pointed out there’s a whole ever-growing blacklist of partially incompatible enclosures that basically flake out whenever they feel like it. Worse yet, not every device is on the list so you frequently have to research and add devices yourself.
The last generic Inland m.2 enclosure I bought worked fine… for 1 hour. Then it disconnected and reconnected. I thought it was just random chance, until it happened again and again and again. Did the deep-dive research, found the chipset was partially incompatible and I had to return it.
DO NOT BUY CHEAP ENCLOSURES FOR EXTERNAL MEDIA ON RPI
My approach to this has always been to buy one enclosure and validate it, then go buy like 8 more after thorough testing. Obviously don’t place an order for 10 units of an unknown tech item from AliExpress or you’re looking at a bad time. Look for enclosures that use known good chipsets and there’s not as much risk as you’re expecting. I have something like 8 msata enclosures here that work flawlessly and another half dozen sata+nvme rtl9210b enclosures that also work well.
What about enclosures from Sabrent? That should be a reliable manufacturer, no?
Unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations I can give you as each enclosure could use a different chipset. It seems that the brand does not have a good reputation for compatibility but that list is fairly old at this point. All I can say is if you find an enclosure you like, plug the model number into the raspberry pi forum and see if anybody had to add it to the quirks list.
I heard it’s not so good practice to buy used drives so I will not do that for now but thanks for the second part I will consider that!
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.
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.
Crucial is fine. It’s commonly found in corporate and government workstations.
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.
As the Pi can boot from USB, I wonder if anyone tried to use those “SSD in pendrive form factor” devices for this, eg. the Transcend ESD310S 512GB?
Happy cake day!
Is cake day even a thing on day zero? Haha… thanks! :)
Jeff Geerling ran some benchmarks on USB storage options in 2020, including a pen drive SSD: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/fastest-usb-storage-options-raspberry-pi
Samsung T7 totally worth every cent. You connect it via USB-C.
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?
I’m not sure what kind of money you want to spend? The M2 Hat is ~$14 USD and a 2242 NVME SSD can be had for ~$30-$40 USD since you don’t care as much about performance.
The USB to SATA adapter is going to run ~$10 USD and the SATA SSD drives are going to start ~$20 USD are go up from there depending on size, performance, etc.
If size of storage is an issue, the SATA SSD is probably the better route. I believe the NVME would be better performance since it utilizes the bus on the Pi more fully.
I would guess that for the money, most M2 drives and SATA SSD drives are going to be similar lifespans
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.
Could you elaborate?
