Need to expand local storage for local media streaming. Running a regular desktop on linux.
I am willing to spend money on “the best” for streaming purpose while and hopefully something I can keep reusing down the road if it lasts.
That really depends. If you’ll eventually get a NAS, I recommend a NAS HDD because they do better with 24/7 operation. They also use a bit less power than desktop HDDs (which you shouldn’t get anyway, just get an SSD for your desktop/laptop), if you care about that.
I use two WD Red HDDs in my NAS (just an old desktop PC), and I’ve had Hitachi in the past. I use SSDs exclusively for my gaming desktop and laptop though, because performance is a lot more important than cost.
It probably doesn’t matter at the scale you’ll be operating. But Backblaze has more data than anyone here about reliability.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/
Used to run over 40 drives. Backblaze pointed out those Toshiba’s. Man they do not die.
Whatever you get, get at least two and do RAID1/5/6. They will break.
Speed shouldn’t be an issue for streaming media.
yeah that’s what I was thinking. how complex is it to set up raid on linux?
LVM is a good way to do raid on linux
Does no one care about power consumption? Mechanical disks use, in my experience, 7-15w all day all the time just idling. If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years. If you can afford it, splurge for SSD. I spent ~$800 on two 8tb SSDs and I’m very happy with the choice.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.
My SSDs use negligible power at idle, I only noticed a 1w increase when I installed two. Almost ‘free’. Also your 0.14kwh is almost certainly just the cost to generate the power minus the delivery fees. Where I live the delivery fees double my true per kWh cost. Double check your bill and divide your monthly consumption by your monthly payment to find the real cost.
Here’s my current bill:
- usage - 420 kWh
- total - $58.86 (mix of winter and summer usage)
- stated rate - $0.09-0.10/kWh for “block 1”, 0.10-0.12 for “block 2” (they charge more the more you use)
- calculated average rate (inclusive of all fees and credits) - $0.14/kWh
And here’s my previous bill (all summer usage w/ AC and whatnot):
- usage - 522 kWh
- total - $80.17
- stated rate - $0.09/kWh for “block 1,” $0.117/kWh for “block 2”
- calculated average rate - $0.154/kWh
That’s why I gave the $0.12-0.15/kWh range, because it depends on time of year, total usage, etc. It’ll probably be closer to $0.12/kWh next month since we’d use hardly any electricity (we use natural gas for heat).
Thats friggin bananas. Do you live somewhere with lots of hydro power? Your cost is less than 1/3 mine…
Nope, I live in Utah, US, which is mostly coal, natural gas, and solar, in that order, and we’ve been scaling coal back significantly and replacing it with gas and solar (and a little wind). We’re about average for the US:
The average cost per kWh in the U.S. as of January 2024 is 15.45 cents
That said, I heard that our local electricity company wants to hike rates, and that seems to be about $0.03/kWh. So my range would go up to $0.15-0.18/kWh, which still isn’t that crazy.
Does no one care about power consumption?
It takes several SSDs to make up the capacity difference between an HDD.
I run 62 16TB HDDs. To make up the same capacity in SSDs I need 2-4x the bays. I don’t know of any cheap systems that can hold ~250 bays of ssds.
So an SSD that may only take 1-3w all day… 2-4x that is already equal to the HDD regardless. You’re not going to make any ROI metric here.
I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but I just bought the biggest 5400rpm HDD that was in my price range when I set up. Might notice the slower speed when doing a big data dump, but for streaming purposes you can run many 4k streams concurrently and the bottleneck would probably be your network speed before you hit a drive read bottleneck.
Second this. What you need for high quality media is space, not speed. For any single stream, network and drive will be fast enough anyway. Your typical HDD offers like 4-6 times the bandwidth that a regular Blu-ray can provide. You can get 8TB HDDs for the price of 2TB SSDs. Random access doesn’t matter for that application.
You might want to invest in redundancy and use a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, depends on how valuable that media is to you or how long it would take to recover in case it’s lost. A simple solution would be a btrfs software RAID, in case your are after something like a Linux home media server with Jellyfin.
I would get a recertified enterprise drive from Server Part Deals. Drives in the 12-18TB range currently have the best price per TB. Be sure to get a SATA drive if it’s going in a desktop.
Fully agree.
I’ve purchased refurb drives from both them and GoHardDrive.com. So far I’m 5/5 for a mix of Exos and HGST Ultrastar drives working perfectly out of the box.
Anytime these drives pop up on Slickdeals, the thread is full of 3 types of people: People who have never bought a refurb/recert drive but insist they are all going to burn your house down, people who have bought several with no issue, and people who have received a failing drive that the seller promptly replaced.
