this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
46 points (94.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39167 readers
387 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] theorangeninja@lemmy.today 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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

[–] thayer@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 1 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] theorangeninja@lemmy.today 1 points 3 weeks ago

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?

[–] paf@jlai.lu 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago

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).

[–] FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago
[–] theorangeninja@lemmy.today 1 points 3 weeks ago

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