Best HDD/SSD for local media hosting
Best HDD/SSD for local media hosting
Need to expand local storage for local media streaming. Running a regular desktop on linux.
I am willing to spend money on "the best" for streaming purpose while and hopefully something I can keep reusing down the road if it lasts.
Does no one care about power consumption? Mechanical disks use, in my experience, 7-15w all day all the time just idling. If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years. If you can afford it, splurge for SSD. I spent ~$800 on two 8tb SSDs and I'm very happy with the choice.
If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years
~$800 on two 8tb SSDs
2 x 8tb HDDs is roughly $200USD
I don't know what kind of electricity prices you're paying, but to hit a 3 year ROI on your SSDs, you're paying at least $2.2USD/kWh, assuming the full 15W (232kWh/year total) consumption of the HDDs and assuming negligible power consumption from the SSDs.
Edit2: and to be fair I did take refurb HDD price. a refurb SSD is around $300 USD for 8tb, bringing the minimum power cost per kWh down to ~$1.7USD/kWh for a 3 year ROI.
I don't know if I'm alone on this, but I just bought the biggest 5400rpm HDD that was in my price range when I set up. Might notice the slower speed when doing a big data dump, but for streaming purposes you can run many 4k streams concurrently and the bottleneck would probably be your network speed before you hit a drive read bottleneck.
Whatever you get, get at least two and do RAID1/5/6. They will break.
Speed shouldn't be an issue for streaming media.
yeah that's what I was thinking. how complex is it to set up raid on linux?
It probably doesn't matter at the scale you'll be operating. But Backblaze has more data than anyone here about reliability.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/
Used to run over 40 drives. Backblaze pointed out those Toshiba's. Man they do not die.
Had (and probably have it somewhere) a 2TB Toshiba drive for +5 years in my desktop as a games and programs data grave. Never once had an issue.
My current NAS drives are also Toshiba helium filled drives and though loud are okayish under light read operations.
I would get a recertified enterprise drive from Server Part Deals. Drives in the 12-18TB range currently have the best price per TB. Be sure to get a SATA drive if it's going in a desktop.
Fully agree.
I've purchased refurb drives from both them and GoHardDrive.com. So far I'm 5/5 for a mix of Exos and HGST Ultrastar drives working perfectly out of the box.
Anytime these drives pop up on Slickdeals, the thread is full of 3 types of people: People who have never bought a refurb/recert drive but insist they are all going to burn your house down, people who have bought several with no issue, and people who have received a failing drive that the seller promptly replaced.
Last time someone mentioned these on Lemmy I got one.
It “crashed” according to Synology in about a week. Woke me up in the middle of the night with the Synology beeping.
Was the drive scanned for errors before installing it? I’ve been running 2x8TB drives for about 1.5 years. If a drive fails, it is better to find out earlier while they are within warranty.
Thanks for this.
Any difference between them? Any concern for going with cheapest option within a size class?
There isn't one.
Stick to the best brands out there that have been benchmarked.