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.
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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.
Does no one care about power consumption?
It takes several SSDs to make up the capacity difference between an HDD.
I run 62 16TB HDDs. To make up the same capacity in SSDs I need 2-4x the bays. I don’t know of any cheap systems that can hold ~250 bays of ssds.
So an SSD that may only take 1-3w all day… 2-4x that is already equal to the HDD regardless. You’re not going to make any ROI metric here.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.
My SSDs use negligible power at idle, I only noticed a 1w increase when I installed two. Almost ‘free’. Also your 0.14kwh is almost certainly just the cost to generate the power minus the delivery fees. Where I live the delivery fees double my true per kWh cost. Double check your bill and divide your monthly consumption by your monthly payment to find the real cost.
Here’s my current bill:
- usage - 420 kWh
- total - $58.86 (mix of winter and summer usage)
- stated rate - $0.09-0.10/kWh for “block 1”, 0.10-0.12 for “block 2” (they charge more the more you use)
- calculated average rate (inclusive of all fees and credits) - $0.14/kWh
And here’s my previous bill (all summer usage w/ AC and whatnot):
- usage - 522 kWh
- total - $80.17
- stated rate - $0.09/kWh for “block 1,” $0.117/kWh for “block 2”
- calculated average rate - $0.154/kWh
That’s why I gave the $0.12-0.15/kWh range, because it depends on time of year, total usage, etc. It’ll probably be closer to $0.12/kWh next month since we’d use hardly any electricity (we use natural gas for heat).
Thats friggin bananas. Do you live somewhere with lots of hydro power? Your cost is less than 1/3 mine…
Nope, I live in Utah, US, which is mostly coal, natural gas, and solar, in that order, and we’ve been scaling coal back significantly and replacing it with gas and solar (and a little wind). We’re about average for the US:
The average cost per kWh in the U.S. as of January 2024 is 15.45 cents
That said, I heard that our local electricity company wants to hike rates, and that seems to be about $0.03/kWh. So my range would go up to $0.15-0.18/kWh, which still isn’t that crazy.
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.
When I bought them 2 years ago power in MA was $0.46 per kWh, this included transmission costs and all the other fees. 15W cost me $4.80 a month, so $57.6 a year and $230 over 4 years. At the time 14TB mechanical disks were about $300 so it was about a $270 ‘premium’ for solid state over mechanical so I exaggerated the ROI, but to me the 2x price premium was worth it for silence and no latency on retrieving my data. So in summary the ROI for me was more like 8 years, ignoring the many advantages of SSD.
Are SSDs reliable enough for this use case?
Any quality brand SSD (Samsung, Kingston, WD, etc) is going to be more reliable in every way compared to mechanical disks, they just cost a lot more right now. Do NOT buy off brand, random Chinese SSD, you will regret it.
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.
I just grabbed a pair of 18TB Seagate Exos SATA drives - surprisingly quiet for what they are.
Should I be concerned about noise? I haven’t used HDD in a long time?
I recently got some Toshibas and they were loud. They also presented with a seek error pre-fail after a few days (all three of them). That propably adds to the volume, but the seagate and wds I switched to just have some clicking noises. Not too bad.
In my experience, Seagate exos are only “loud/clicky” when under HEAVY write loads. Mostly they’re pretty quiet with a very low drone at worst. In any decent case it’ll be pretty negligible. With headphones on doubly so.
This is my experience. I had them on my desk in a test bay to make sure they were all good to go and the only time I notice them is when they’re doing a lot of read/write movements. While they idle they’re quiet. So it depends on your use case, where the drive physically is, and what the drive is attached to. If it’s mounted with nice rubber dampers or something you might never hear them. If they’re mounted up to a loose chunk of metal they might rattle and drive you nuts.
IMO, yes. HDDs are always going to be a bit noisy, but the consumer grades keep it fairly classy. The couple of HGST drives I got from ServerPartDeals are noisy in the “grating” way. The volume is similar but the noise is not in the normal pleasant range. I am only fine with it because my server is in another room.
Thanks for this.
Any difference between them? Any concern for going with cheapest option within a size class?
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.
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’s extremely simple. Although I prefer ZFS I will give you an example with BTRFS since it’s easier to get going. RAID1 in BTRFS is considered stable (RAID5/6 is not).
sudo mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/sdx /dev/sdy # Create raid array with BTRFS sudo mkdir /mnt/storage # Create your mount directory echo "/dev/sdx /mnt/storage btrfs noatime,compress=zstd 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab # Set raid array to mount at boot sudo mount -t btrfs -o noatime,compress=zstd /dev/sdx /mnt/storage # Manually mount the first timeYou would also probably wanna set up a btrfs scrub once per month, either with systemd-timers or cron, whatever you prefer.
Depends on your setup. I’m a btrfs guy, so I’d go with something similar as your other reply. It’s just as easy to remove/replace/add drives. They don’t even have to match in size. Just remember to balance after doing modifications to your array.
There isn’t one.
Stick to the best brands out there that have been benchmarked.
That really depends. If you’ll eventually get a NAS, I recommend a NAS HDD because they do better with 24/7 operation. They also use a bit less power than desktop HDDs (which you shouldn’t get anyway, just get an SSD for your desktop/laptop), if you care about that.
I use two WD Red HDDs in my NAS (just an old desktop PC), and I’ve had Hitachi in the past. I use SSDs exclusively for my gaming desktop and laptop though, because performance is a lot more important than cost.
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.
Second this. What you need for high quality media is space, not speed. For any single stream, network and drive will be fast enough anyway. Your typical HDD offers like 4-6 times the bandwidth that a regular Blu-ray can provide. You can get 8TB HDDs for the price of 2TB SSDs. Random access doesn’t matter for that application.
You might want to invest in redundancy and use a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, depends on how valuable that media is to you or how long it would take to recover in case it’s lost. A simple solution would be a btrfs software RAID, in case your are after something like a Linux home media server with Jellyfin.
