this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
11 points (92.3% liked)

Selfhosted

39939 readers
368 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I use a simple 2.5" external usb drive connecter to my router as a shared drive on my home network. I also use it to run my router's torrent download tool and get new content.

The external drive is not new and I worry that with the constant load it might fail one day. It's also slow sometimes when watching content directly from it with kodi.

What would you suggest I replace it with? Would a 3.5" external usb drive be safer?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A single drive is always going to be a potential point of failure. Definitely make periodic backups to a different device if you don't want to potentially lose everything on it without warning.

There are more complicated solutions available, such as a RAID array, but it sounds like you want to keep things relatively simple. In that case, I don't think there will be a whole lot of difference between 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives -- except that there are 3.5 inch drives designed for data center applications which may net you some extra reliability. You'd likely need to get such a drive and put it into your own external enclosure, though.

That said, there's only so much you should expect to get out of a single drive connected via USB (relatively slower transfers, reliance on the bespoke external bay, potentially not getting warned if SMART status changes).

[–] Leax@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You're right, if I really want to improve things, I should go for a Raid solution, but that invoke a NAS or a desktop pc I suppose, so... Maybe next year! Thank you!