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?
First things first, unless you are strictly mailing yourself or you plan on having discussions with google/microsoft/apple… dump the mail Idea, Trust me it’s not worth it and probably won’t work.
Second for what you want almost everything will be held in ram and the drive won’t matter except boot time, I say almost because you want a samba server so the question quickly becomes how much data do you have and how much money are you willing to spend. I would make the argument that the boot drive should always be ssd but the rest is a matter of patience and money
TLDR: don’t bother with Email, boot is ssd and reset hdd unless you’re rich or not much data.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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Raspberry pi is power limited. HDD creates a power spike on boot as well so you may have power issues. When i used a rpi for a media server, i had to use a 25W supply. Even 20W wasnt enough and i had voltage throttling issues. 1TB HDD probably wont draw that much power but SSD is never an issue. If you dont need space and are on a budget SSD is the way to go. This is all assuming USB is used for power.
If you need large amounts of space and have a budget, use an HDD but it needs to be self powered or used with a larger device like a mini pc which has adequate internal power.
My RPi4 refused to start with a 2x2.5" hard drive, so I did some workarounds. I connected the USB 3.0 +5V pin to the GPIO and powered the RPi using a PD trigger with MINI 560 (5A DC-DC converter). In my case, a random 18W QC brick was enough.
