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Turris Omnia. Powerful hardware, auto updates, config backup / restore (with anti-bricking feature), SIM slot, etc

As someone reading this thread, I’m stuck in an endless loop.

Holy shit, I stand corrected, those graphs speak for themselves. Bookmarked for future stats.

LE: Well, there’s also the section about average age of failure in their newest report: 2 years and 7 months for HDDs, 14 months for SSDs.

True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.

Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel, it’s not free, but it also monitors drives in Windows so you have an early warning at the first sign of issues. Also logs historic data (writes, temperature, etc) and displays them as graphs.

Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd

I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).

To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.

From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.

If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).

I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.

If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.

If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.

My two, personal opinion cents.