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Cheap but reliable external SSD for RPis

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.

Observer1199 ,

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.

theorangeninja OP ,

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.

seaQueue , (edited )
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

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), blkdiscard the 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.

Dirk ,
@Dirk@lemmy.ml avatar

Samsung T7 totally worth every cent. You connect it via USB-C.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

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

just_another_person ,

Just stick to the brands with multi-year warranties.

theorangeninja OP ,

For example? Kingston, Crucial?

TheBigBrother ,

Look for log2ram on a LLM.

theorangeninja OP ,

Could you elaborate?

empireOfLove2 ,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

theorangeninja OP ,

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.

Markaos ,

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

Engywuck ,

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.

theorangeninja OP ,

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

paf ,

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 #” and see if a list come up. Here is one for HA (but surely more models are compatible than the ones listed here) community.home-assistant.io/t/…/212763

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

FarraigePlaisteach ,
@FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world avatar

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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