Hello!
I am getting the parts together for a tower server build. I plan on running Jellyfin, maybe dive into arrs and nextcloud for 2 users total, wireguard only for external access as it’s not the main focus for now.
Situation: if I have access to refurb/used 4TB enterprise HDDs at the same price as 1.9ish TB enterprise SSDs.
I’d take lower capacity as it is not that big of a concern for me rn. I want to have somewhat redundant storage of my documents, photos, but otherwise it’s not gonna be a giant media vault overflowing with movies.
Question: In terms of noise, shipping concerns and longevity, would you go with SSDs instead of HDDs? Is it lower maintenance?
I can of course buy spinners later if I find flash only to be restricting in any way, and add to the rig as needed.
Speed would not be an issue in any case. This is for TrueNAS scale, so zfs. I am planning to buy 3-4 disks now, and add more if needed in 6 months time or later.
I am eager to hear others opininons on this. Thanks!
From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.
If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).
I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.
If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.
If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.
My two, personal opinion cents.
HDDs wear out too. The liftime of an SSD are just way more deterministic then the lifetime of an HDD. Also reading is way easier on an SSD then on an HDD. (No moving parts and the cells get basically not touched much) SSDs too are meant to overwrite write and read data or do you use a HDD as a data cache?
If noise is a big factor then SSDs are the easiest choice. But they are way more expensive compared to high capacity HDDs(16TB+ are going for less then 15€/TB) When conparing low capacity drives like 4TB then the price for an 4TB SSDs is not too outlandish(still hgher)
An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.
As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.
Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.
Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.