Recently, my 10-year old drive that I pulled out of an old computer died. I want to buy another one now. The machine will run Jellyfin (I have an existing collection that I will be transferring from another drive), Immich, and the *arr stack.
I have this motherboard which has one SATA port and one PCIe x1 port. For this reason, I won’t be able to add a second drive for redudancy, unless I add a PCIe to SATA card.
My biggest concern is that I want the drive to last. I don’t want much capacity, I think 1-2 TB is enough. My budget is from 0€ (of course) to 65-70€.
So I have a couple of questions:
- Should I buy an SSD or an HDD?
- I live in Greece and ServerPartDeals is not an option because shipping is really high. Do you know a place where I could purchase it? (Preferably in Greece, but not necessary)
- Do you have any specific drive suggestions?
- Is there any other way (except for buying a PCIe to SATA card) to add more drives in the motherboard?
Thank you.
If it’s only 2 TB I’d go ssd.
And don’t get a super cheap one, but something from like Samsung or Sandisk or WD or sth.
You can go PCIe to m.2 pcie nvme.
If you dont need the drive to be fast and want best bang for your buck storage capacity, HDD is the way to go.
If you want speed and are ok with a higher price, SSD is best. Used enterprise HDD are usually a good value. Im in the US so not sure about where to purchase exactly.
Something to consider is if the drive you are storing the os and files on are the same, using am HDD will make it slower on start up.
If ambient noise is a concern, I’d go with an SSD. If money is tight, an HDD will give you the best value.
My server is in an otherwise quiet home office/sitting room, so I went with an 8TB SSD (870 QVO). Spinning disks make a fair bit of noise just waking up, let alone the actual file operations.
As someone who had jellyfin running on HDD and moved it to a solid state: it’s a night and day difference when loading things. The reduced storage capacity for the same cost is very much worth it IMO.
I have a ~40TB HDD array and jellyfin is super fast. Just put the database and cache files on a SSD.
For bulk storage of 4k videos with high bitrates HDDs are way cheaper.
I have a ~40TB HDD array and jellyfin is super fast
I hope it is. But OP has a single drive.
True multiple drives speed up reads significantly. As long as the videos are sequential read speeds can be very fast (600MB/s) even on one drive though. Results may vary.
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 10 acronyms.
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Going in a different direction here:
Buy a stable SSD with your budget to host your OS. Then call around to computer repair places, or E-Waste recycling joints, and ask if they have any old HDD drives laying around that can be recycled to use. Use these older HDDs to store your media and things that can be replaced. You may even get lucky enough to have a few larger HDDs where you can make a backup of your SATA HDD over USB every so often.
Why use SSD OS (unless he is using windows ). System can do to USB stick and rest od data to disk, and SSD may be a good option.
At that capacity, I’ll cast another vote for SSD if at all possible, but you can certainly get small HDDs pretty cheap now.
If you want the easiest and cheapest way to add more drives, do a search for “sata port multiplier”. These cards go for around $25US on Amazon or Ebay. They are NOT fast! It uses a single SATA port to run up to five drives, so all the drives split the bandwidth, but long ago I ran some of them for a few years without any problems. You simply run a sata and power cable from your motherboard to the card, then plug in your drives, it doesn’t even require a slot on your motherboard.
