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  • Honestly 10-20 Gb for OS. 200-500 Mb for UEFI. Everything else separate. A cheap SATA low capacity SSD is fine for the OS usually. Bulk storage is still cheapest on Hard Disk.

    M.2 is great and all if you can afford. But unless your network is over 2.5 gbps or you are simultaneously streaming large video streams to multiple clients. Regular SATA drives will be able to keep up fine.

    • Thank you for the reply to my first Lemmy post. I guess this works 😁

      • No worries. And honestly if you haven't already committed to a particular Mini PC or absolutely need the form factor. I'd seriously suggest looking on eBay for some old e-waste.

        I personally run an old dell business system with a 4th Gen i7 with 16Gb of ram. Cost about 100 dollars when I got it. I run a Minecraft server, Luanti server, jellyfin for movies and TV streaming, icecast/liquidsoap/libretime to stream my own private automated Internet radio, and NFS/SAMBA for NAS. And I still have RAM, CPU, and bandwidth free on a 1gbps network.

        The only thing a newer system will net you is possibly a bit more power efficiency. Which depending on electricity costs where you are might make a new system attractive.

        Lol but getting into homelabbing, new or old; it's still a gateway drug. One of my favorite BSD/Linux things. At least for hardwired clients is just having my home directory on the NAS. I have a........few systems, and being able to have my downloads and documents etc all right there. Being able to wipe and reinstall the workstation without worrying about my data if I want to distro hop. It's great. Only downside that pops up rarely is file locking. Other than that my files and app settings follow me to all of them.

      • Literally what the other guy that replied to this comment says buy an old server off eBay swap out the drives be set for life

    • I was running the numbers in my head and realized that if hosting media like music and video files where it's just written to once and read from a lot, a large 2.5 inch SSD might be a better buy than a HDD (especially if size limited to a 2.5 inch HDD). My reasoning is that a HDD needs replacement after around 50,000 power on hours. But an SSD needs replacement depending on how often the entire drive is overwritten. For a media server that should mean that the HDD will be replaced much more often than an SSD. And that's without considering vibration related issues of having multiple drives in the same server or if you experience frequent power outages (both of which would make a better case for an ssd.

      So what I do is I use an M.2 SSD for the OS, and the largest 2.5 sata SSD I can find which will fit my storage and backup solution. (recently bought 4x 8TB SSDs). For the m.2 drive, try to get the best value size as I've never heard anyone complain about having too big of a drive.

      For all SSDs (m.2 and data) make sure that it accurately reports SMART data for you can keep tabs on their health metrics.

      • In 40+ years of using HDD I can count failures on one hand. Generally related to power issues. I have many well over 70000 hours. I recently picked up 2 used 12Tb Enterprise drives for less than the cost 1 consumer 12Tb drives to add to the mix as well. I have another 8 to 12 decommissioned enterprise drives in different systems.

        You never trust your data to a single drive or single medium. Otherwise effectively you've already lost it. And dollar per dollar SSD simply cannot beat traditional hard drives for capacity. Just seek time and transfer rate.

        Just my music library is over a terabyte of largely 320 bits per second mp3. Storage for miscellaneous videos about six times that. And then my streaming library of video. Has been traditionally large enough to make re-encoding and shrinking worth while to get more. Upgrading from divix/xvid in the late 90s early aughts. H264 in the early 2010s. H265 in the late 2010s. Currently converting to av1 from source discs etc. Some of the spinning rust I am using has seen all those Transitions and been Rewritten many times. Which would have been very rough on an SSD. LOL I may have a problem.

        Regardless there's nothing wrong with any particular storage technology. No reason to avoid one over the other as long as it does what you need. And if you're data is small enough to fit economically on an SSD then they will suit your solution perfectly. Just remember your three, two, one.

      • any solution for getting automated SMART reports if errors start popping up? I would prefer not to have to check manually

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