Selecting a hard drive for a Pi4

Seagate expansion+ portable 1tb works well for me, no trouble in about 3 years of continued use as the only drive of a Pi3 web+file server. ?44 right now.

For the always-on Pi4, I use a Samsung T5 ssd 500gb. Running for about 8 months now? Also no problem, and much faster of course. Fairly expensive.

If you are only after 500GB, you might want to consider an SSD.

The USB native drives are slightly smaller and neater, and slightly lower power as they don't have a USB to SATA interface. Loose drives and enclosure might cost more, but you can keep the enclosure if you decide to get a larger drive at a later date.

Definitely avoid, but only an issue on 3.5" drives of over 8TD. Hang on, just thought I'd check that, and there are stories of 2.5" WD SMR drives as small as 2TB being sold for home use.

---druck

I've been using WD Blue drives for some time now in both 2.5" and 3.5" forms. They're coming up around 22,000 hours now and no issues so far.

The Fujitsu 2.5" in the Lenovo T440 I'm writing this on is at around

I also have a pair of 1TB WD Essentials units (neat, small, packaged 2.5" USB drives) I use for storing offline backups, used in rotation so the data on one is never more than one backup out of date. They seem fine, but they only get light use: plugged in for a couple of hours every other week and I can say the same for 2TB unit I've had for a couple of years now. Its my overnight backup disk - continuously powered, but only mounted and spinning for maybe 10 minutes every night. Again, no problems at all.

As to which way to jump, aesthetics is important I think, and whether you're going to cart the RPi4 around or treat it like a desktop system has a bearing too.

My WD Essentials never seem to get to more than blood heat and are certainly well sealed against dust and may be splashproof too. On current showing I'd buy them again for the sort of use case I have for them, but if I was going to cart an RPi4 around I'd put an uncased HDD or SSD in the same enclosure as the RPi 0 and build the latter myself if I couldn't find any enclosure that I liked.

There seem to be a number of pseudo-laptop cases around: thin clamshells with a screen and keyboard and space under the keyboard for an RPim some data storage and maybe even a battery as well. As I say, I've seen writeups, but not got my paws on one and don't know prices. However, something like that might be worth a look.

Yes, the thought of them makes my teeth itch a bit. If they become unavoidable I'll probably just go SSD and give up my addiction to spinning rust.

HTH

That was a new one on me

These days my drives are either SSD (mostly 120GB boot drives) or second hand 3.5" SAS drives which are dirt cheap, generally barely used (they've usually been spinning for a year or two in a low load server so not very busy) and *very* reliable, they get used in ZFS mirrors on a big file server, erm NAS, and I've yet to see the weekly scrub have anything to do or any sign of performance loss through remapping which I found quite noticeable using consumer SATA drives such as WD reds.

What are you going to *do* with it? If you actually are going to carry it around between computers, it might be handy to grab a pre-built portable unit. However, when considering the use for RPi projects:

1. You might get more milage out of a simple USB adaptor (SATA or otherwise) rather than a full enclosure if you have a project in mind with a custom case for the RPi, storage, battery, and/or whatever else it uses.
2. A 3.5? enclosure has more use cases if you don?t really need the portability. You may even be able to fit the RPi in one along with a

That's rather tempting. The local Target big-box store offers a Seagate

Speed is nice, but low cost and low power consumption are more important. I'm a little unclear on the details, but have the impression that SSDs are not much better than mechanical drives for power and worse for cost.

Is this close to correct?

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

How do SSDs compare for always-on power consumption?

Excellent point I didn't consider up to now....drives do fail.

Hopefully I'm safe if I stick to 1 TB...

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

That is _very_ encouraging. I've seen enough complaints about WD to become extremely wary, but have no first-hand experience with them.

Mine is an always-on (but not always busy) scenario. Do your WD Essentials have some sort of intelligent sleep mode? I'd expect Rasbian to handle that.

Mine is essentially a desktop (actually, kitchen table top) setup. No portability required. I would like to avoid "custom" things, sticking to components (expecially cables and power supplies) that can be quicky replaced if somethign fails.

Right now the Pi3 enclosure hangs on the back of the monitor, I'll likely do something similar with the drive. Probably do the same with the powered USB hub unless I can get away without it using a Pi4.

Thanks very much for your insights!

bob prohaska

Desktop, always on, not portable. Commodity parts, no custom cables or enclosures if possible. Minimalist, if possible, with low power consumption and low(ish) clutter.

Intriguing idea. Violates my "no custom" rule, but rules are made to be bent......

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

The "portable" part was important for me, i.e. it's a 2.5" drive that can be directly plugged into the Pi without a need for (powered) usb hubs or its own power lead. Idk about brand reliability. Nowadays everything is either Seagate or WD and I imagine that, globally, they are very comparable or even ~identical.

Yes power consumption is probably about the same. The spinning drive probably has a higher peak power (at startup) which for some models, especially 3.5", might mean that they need external power. Never noticed that with the 2.5" and while using the official RPi power adapter. The Pi4 is so much faster *and* it has usb3 which made me definitely want to use an ssd for it, to take advantage of all that speed. Otherwise I could have just used a Pi3. Yeah like i said, fairly expensive. In the last year, i've seen the T5

Try getting a "second-hand" M2 drive and NGFF to USB3 adapter.

Much lower in idle. HDDs can spin down which reduces idle power a lot, but you then have to wait seconds for them to spin up again.

I wouldn't worry about it. When I look at 3.5" drives the USB drives are typically cheaper than the SATA drives, so the adapter has a negative cost. I don't know the 2.5" market to know if that's true there.

Unless you're going to want to shuck the drive and put it inside a PC, I'd go with a USB drive as the enclosure is usually good. Some cheap USB-SATA enclosures can be rather rattly and less good at ventilation.

Some drives aren't SATA internally so there's no adapter to remove, they only do USB. I think this is more common with 2.5". You'd have to check the teardown for a specific model to confirm.

Nope:

Tread carefully with drives advertised as 'backup' or 'archive'. But in general you'll have to look up the exact model number.

Theo

In message , A. Dumas writes

That is interesting.

A year or so back, I tried a 1TB Samsung SSD (I forget the model) on a Pi2, and whilst it formatted OK, when I started copying data over from a HD, it would get to 4% and stop. At which point it unmounted the SSD. I had several attempts at this, and every time it failed. Made no difference whether I'd done the format/partitioning on the Pi or another

I'm still in the market for two SSDs of about 1TB, so recommendations welcome (running on a Pi2 and a Pi3).

Adrian

Did you reformat it? 'Didn't support the OS' is a cop-out because SSDs don't need to support a particular OS, they're standardised. The only thing that might care is the backup software that might be shipped on the drive, which is usually worthless anyway.

However if the drive came formatted as NTFS, the Linux NTFS drivers aren't that good (due to Microsoft's patents and secrecy) and might have had problems. It shouldn't have had problems if reformatted to a more sensible filesystem.

Any old SATA SSD in a USB enclosure? (An NVMe in an enclosure should also work, but the speed will be wasted)

Theo

I would go for an SSD as you can power that from just the USB cable.

Looking at Amazon there appears to be about 25% inflation of both a 240 GB SSD and the USB SATA connector since December.

I have tried both in my Rpi4. The 2.5 hdd (ex laptop drive) I use as a NAS drive always on. It has dropped off a couple of times in the last 3 months. I should investigate.

I think SSD is lower power, especially when idle. A 2.5 HDD definitely requires more power to start, possibly the HDD is more efficient for continuous writing, but I doubt it.

I suspect the SSD might last longer too, for always on, but reliability comes and goes. I still have a working SSD over a decade old Intel X25-E Extreme 32GB, now always on in my router. However, I had 3 or 4 OCZ SSDs fail after a few years.

I've only had problem with one batch of WD drives and that was years ago. I don't recall what drive was originally in the box or what sort of box it was in, but its disk died and I fitted a WD because previous ones had been good. The new drive died in under 10 hours and so did the first and second replacements (same batch?), but the 3rd was fine. No quibbles from WD about replacing those drives either.

I've never used Seagate, but Fujitsu have been OK. The only really crap drives I've had were Maxstor - I has 2-3 of them before I realised that they were failing sooner than expected (at about 2 years of evening-only use) when their speed would decline into the unusable range fairly fast. Fortunately they remained usable long enough to get a final backup off them, even if it did take 1-2 hours to make the backup. This was back when a 40MB 3.5" disk was considered quite big.

Yes. My backup routine mounts the drive, does the backup and unmounts. A few minutes after being unmounted, the drive starts a slow flash (2-4 seconds per cycle).

If the price is right for you, WD Essentials (or equivalent) looks like a good way to go. A cable is included with the drive.

I've fitted a Sandisk 128 GB SSD in an old Lenovo R61i when its original Fujitsu HDD dies at around 49,000 hours. I tried fitting a replacement HDD but it turned out that the Lenovo's disk interface would NOT access any drive bigger than 250GB and by then you couldn't buy HDDS of less than

Like all my systems, I run Smartdisk on R61i and recently noticed that the spun-up hours in the SSD are only going up by 2-3 hours a week (the R61i is currently running 24/7 folding proteins at home - this makes very minimal, if any, use of the SSD - while my house server, which also runs

Have any of you noticed a similar pattern? I'm curious as to why the SSD's spun-up hours should be so low - its almost as though its only counting the time when its actively transferring data as 'spun-up time'. If so thats a rough approximation of the time it takes to do a weekly rsync backup followed by a Fedora dnf update of OS and apps plus a little extra for the nightly logwatch run.

It was formatted and partitioned several times over (I think as ext3 or

Thanks. A thought I had after the above problem. I've got a couple of

Adrian

Maxtor were bought by Seagate some years ago, and the quality of Seagate drives (especially those marked "Made in China") dropped noticeably -- they'd been the "go to" brand, before that. I think Seagate are over that, now, and there's no reason to prefer any other brand over them.

The only drives I've bought recently have been Toshiba (both 3.5" and