I own several external 2.5’’ HDDs on the 1 TB range where I save my data. Samsung has worked well for me, but now I need more space.
One option would be to buy an external SSD instead of HDD.
Another would be to get an external NVME, but so far I haven’t found cases for them.
Nowadays we even have 1 TB flash drives, should I get one of these instead?
I could also buy 2 0.5 TB micro SD cards instead.
So many options make it difficult to decide.
What brands and technologies do you recommend?
Software is going to be debian based.
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WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.
Entirely depends if you count HGST as Western Digital or not, because they by far dominate the back blaze reliability scoreboards. IronWolf don’t even come close and are extremely hit or miss depending on capacity.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
What happened with WD? I’ve never had a drive from them go bad but I’d like to switch if that’s going to change
I have a Seagate Barracuda in my gaming rig and it’s making really concerning sounds since the very beginning. Even my 12 years old laptop’s drive isn’t that bad
Be careful if you buy a Samsung 8x0 SSD. They have long standing bugs that may cause data loss. They are worked around in the kernel, however you have to ensure that the workaround for your particular model exists in the kernel version you use.
ASUSTOR has NAS that can have up to 12 NVME SSDs (but speed is very limited by PCIE lanes).
NVME SSDs are still very expensive compares to HDD.
NAS that have many HDD bays are expensive but designed for easy setup and easy management.
Fractal Design Define 7 (XL) can have up to 18 HDDs by design, but then you will need to search for PCIE to SATA cards and PSU that have many SATA connectors (for example RM850x/RM1000x) and Molex to SATA cables.
FSP CMT370 is a much cheaper case with up to 3.5" HDD *9 or 2.5" SSD *10 but it’s not on amazon, it probably doesn’t sell to western world.
SAS drive enclosures (and SAS cards) are also an option, but the cages might be very loud because they are designed for servers that also are very loud.
It depends on what you need. I have a PC that has an nvme for the system and three 4 TB hdds for all kinds of shit. Games, music, movies… Etc. I also have a Synology NAS that has two 4 TB HDDs. My daily driver pc has a 512 nvme for Linux system, 2TB SATA SSD for emulation and steam games, and a 1TB SATA SSD for microwinodows. It all depends on what you need to store and how you want to store them. My best advice is to
dogo the SATA SSD route. They’re relatively cheap, last a very long time and very fast.The cheapest you’ll find that is still pretty good for HDDs is serverpartdeals. They have recertified Seagate Exos X22 20TB drives with 2 year warranties for $215. They also offer new drives with the full 5 years, ofc. Exos can be a little loud, as with other enterprise drives. You’ll still need a way to read from it in case you don’t have a spare drive bay, too.
Do you have any extreme conditions that may affect your cluster?
If everything is standard, just go mid to low grade and raid it. If heat, radiation, reliability, or energy usage are funded concerns, then the answer changes.
Micro SD is probably the least reliable but all these media kind of suck. You need redundancy and frequent testing etc. A pain. I think it gets worthwhile when you have enough data to fill several spinny drives so you can set up a RAID. That means at least 20TB these days. My own stuff right now is on Hetzner Storage Box plus several mongrel servers.
