HDD or SSD for a home server? - eviltoast

I’m new to this stuff so go easy on me.

So I want to get into selfhosting, and I’ve decided to get a Raspberry Pi 5. I plan to attach drives to it, from about 500GB-1TB. I’m on a budget, preferably under $100.

I want to host these things:

  • A personal lemmy instance
  • A samba server, to store files and backups
  • A mail server
  • A few other light docker containers

I was wondering whether I should get an SSD or an HDD for these. Lemmy would probably like an SSD because it uses Postgres, but an HDD would be better for storage since I get more GB per dollar.

What should I go with?

  • TheHolm@aussie.zoneEnglish
    51·
    4 months ago

    couple of old 2.5 HDD + usb to SATA converter. But Pi5 is hardly suitable to host anything. May just get old PC (which gives you HDD too). There are plenty for < $100 or even free. But you are going to pay more for power.

    • theonyltruemupf@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      I have Nextcloud running on a Pi4 and it runs like a charm. It has a lot of RAM and processing power to spare, actually. The good thing about arm mini computers is the exceptionally low power draw. You can’t achieve that with some old x86 PC.

      • lefaucet@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        I second this.

        I have a nextcloud instance on pi4 for personal use and love it.

        It’s not good for live transcoding of video, but works great for calendars, file sharing, photo sharing and music streaming.

        I have a 500 gig SSD for most stuff and a 6TB HDD for backups and archiving.

        I use docker compose to map a folder called archive in my instance to the HDD.