I’m new to this stuff so go easy on me.

So I want to get into selfhosting, and I’ve decided to get a Raspberry Pi 5. I plan to attach drives to it, from about 500GB-1TB. I’m on a budget, preferably under $100.

I want to host these things:

  • A personal lemmy instance
  • A samba server, to store files and backups
  • A mail server
  • A few other light docker containers

I was wondering whether I should get an SSD or an HDD for these. Lemmy would probably like an SSD because it uses Postgres, but an HDD would be better for storage since I get more GB per dollar.

What should I go with?

  • @beepaboopaEnglish
    10•4 months ago

    You’re weighing speed & energy usage vs cost. With a small array, HDDs power draw difference probably won’t amount to much and you may hit the RPi’s I/O bottleneck before fully benefiting from SSDs speeds, though latency would be better.

    But TL;DR: If your goal is to learn and build something cheap, go HDD. If you hate it, you can upgrade over time.