Don't data hoard with SSD's, especially low budget ones. Big box of HDD's as either RAID or some kind of object store with erasure codes is where it is at.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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SSD's are fine for backups. Unless you do a massive amount of writes, which would be weird for backups, they are very power efficient.
This is datahoarder and cost per TB is always important. Also TLC and even worse, QLC SSD's have trouble with long term data retention even without a lot of writes. Not that HDD's are great either. Too bad there is no sane affordable tape storage.
You can get 4TB of high quality HDD for $100 and with your budget you can get that and 2 backup drives
I buy 14TB enterprise helium-filled HDDs off serverpartdeals for like $140 a pop. 4TB for $100 is a bad deal
My NAS is filled with 16 4TB spinning rust drives from various manufacturers. I have been staying away from the helium filled drives mostly because I don’t know much about them but I do know that helium is hard to keep where you want it. How are your drives holding up? How long have you been using them?
The one I've had the longest is 4 years old. So far so good. They have lower heat output than they otherwise would due to lower friction. Other than that they're quite ordinary drives in terms of use.
Not in Europe. Over here, those go for ~350 if you’re lucky
Not really, you can get a 26tb (new) for 340€... Best €/TB would be a 12tb (refurbished) for 120€.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=de&condition=new%2Cused&capacity=12-26&disk_types=internal_hdd
I got the kit for a good deal ($45 CAD +15 shipping) and figured I would fart around with it... I'm now realising I should probably get some smaller nvmes first to play around with this and then setup something with ssd's instead for my mass cloud storage
some cheap and semi decent 4tb nvmes
If you actually go down that road (not really works with cheap), you want to look for TBW in the data sheets. It determines the lifetime of an SSD - yes, some of them die fast.
Cool, thanks for the info!
That thing looks pretty cool. I think I remember Jeff Geerling video where he did something similar. The concept is cool, but that many NVME drives that close will get HOT without active cooling. The other things is I assume they would saturate the PCIe bus way faster than an x86 mobo.
I'm not hating tho, I'm kinda jealous. I have 3 PI 4s and 2 of them boot off a NVME via USB. The third one has a compute module 1 on it so it has dedicated non-volatile memory. I've been thinking about netboot. I use them as a docker swarm.