I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of an external SSD that’d last me a while being plugged into my incredibly simple SBC home server. I’ve done a bit of research but haven’t found much information about USB-connected SSDs and their longevity in terms of 24/7 use.
Some More Specifics What I’m aiming to do is use this drive as NAS that I can access on my home network, it’d mostly be used for syncing backups from devices, but would also probably get use as a general-purpose file storage solution. Basically, it’s going to be plugged into my little Raspberry Pi all the time, but will only be used sporadically and generally won’t be writing huge amounts of data at a time.
Given the above information, are there any external SSDs you could recommend for this application? Or am I worrying too much and should just buy your average Samsung/Kingston/WD/Seagate etc.?
Edit:
Thanks for the advice everyone, that was quick and helpful! The solution I’m gonna go with is a USB caddy/housing to hold a standard internal HDD, so hopefully this is helpful for anyone else in a similar place with a simple home server like mine.
I’ve been running a setup much like this for a year and a half now. I ended up buying a Samsung T5 2TB USB drive and plugging it into my RPi 4. Works amazingly, performance is ideal. And there’s even a way to boot from a USB SSD if you want to avoid SD card wear.
Why the T5 and not a higher tier SSD? Turns our the T7 and higher chips only benefit from speeds if you’ve got a thunderbolt port, consume a lot of extra power, and generate a ton of extra heat. The T5 will hopefully hold up better over time since it’s almost always cool to the touch. Performance has not been an issue.
Of course, you could also look into SBC with built-in PCIe ports and plug an SSD right in.