Hi all,
Quite excited for my first post here and for being able to join the club :)
I recently bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro and put Debian on it. I did use yunohost for over a year and I experimented with basic nginx, fail2ban etc. on a vps but I can’t call myself an expert around these things. For this reason I installed casa-os to ease my way into docker (maybe in the future I will do everything DIY, I do like the idea). I put everything behind tailscale to be able to access the server outside my home.
My idea is to have a media server (radarr and sonarr for movies and tv shows, plus navidrome for my music collection) and some other niceties like audiobookshelf and maybe immich. I still need to learn most things about the arr stack, transcoding and such, so I don’t have any rush.
However, for all these things, I definitely need a larger drive, since the mini pc comes with a 512gb internal ssd.
The S12 also has a 2.5" drive bay (SATA3), but should I go for an internal drive or an external one connected via USB?
Things I am worried about the internal solution is mostly temperatures, everything is so clumped in there and I read some stories about faulty hardware basically heating the sata ssd to death after a while. On the other hand, usb connection is maybe less “stable”? I don’t know. Also, if I go with SATA drive, should I go for ssd or hdd? I don’t have too much budget to invest right now, so cost is somewhat a limit at the moment.
Seeking any advice here and happy to hear more expert people opinion on this, thanks! :)
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Don’t use external drives as non-temporary storage. Backups etc, fine, but not as a replacement for internal storage. It will only lead to headaches at some point. Especially as you have one extra slot.
Thanks! I was planning to add a backup storage at one point, I’ll probably think about this option then :)
I used external USB drives for decades. Provided you buy better quality enclosures, external powered ones, they are fine.
Still going internal is better for tidyness, speed and that accidental cable pull that might always happen with external dangling cables LOL. (Happened).
@Shimitar @whysofurious Same. Getting an enclosure that can properly use linux’s uas driver rather than the usb-storage driver is a night-and-day difference. Read the reviews and get a dedicated single-drive enclosure for like $30, and don’t overlook cooling. Sometimes an external usb fan is a better option than an enclosure with built-in fans but poor airflow.
I can fully relate. Don’t go cheap and keep it cool. For the last few years I used a JBOD enclosure for 3.5in disks with four 2.5in SSDs, I removed the cover and had no needs for fans. Super quiet, and the only viable way to get 4x4Gb added to my laptop-server.
Now I moved to a mid size desktop pc-server, and relocated the four ssds inside the case on sata cables. Cabt really see the speed difference for the workload of the server.
I don’t mean there is no speed difference (before somebody freaks out), but that is not noticeable because I only access the data via network for all my use cases.
Thanks both for the details, I’ll keep everything in mind! Do you have any brand or models you would recommend for your experience? I took a look around and I think I will skip it for now as it will increase my budget a bit more than I want, but I’ll go back to it in the future.
2.5" is going to limit the storage size a lot. So if you need >4TB, the internal option isn’t going to work. A janky solution would be to route the SATA and power connector outside the mini-pc so that you can fit a larger drive, but that’s going to be pretty ugly, and still limit you to only a single drive.
A single hdd can be fast enough to serve UHD ripped 4k video, but it’s much closer to the limit than an ssd would be, and might not be a great experience if you will be doing anything else with that drive at that time. Having a cache drive or multiple hdds in an array (or even better, both) greatly improves this.
A usb enclosure would let you easily have multiple hdds, but as everyone will say, they are less reliable. My opinion is that while you should never use one as a boot/system drive, they’re fine for bulk storage for home use. Make sure you’re not writing logs or anything like that to it, it should be on demand use only, and you might have to reconnect it occasionally. Anecdotally, I’ve never had issues with usb enclosures, they’ve worked fine for me in the past and I continue to use one for backups, but maybe people with some horror stories would have very different views on this.
A single hdd can be fast enough to serve UHD ripped 4k video, but it’s much closer to the limit than an ssd would be, and might not be a great experience if you will be doing anything else with that drive at that time.
You might be mixing up your units here as 4k UHD is typically <90Mb/s while large HDDs typically cap out at 120MB/s, which equates to 960Mb/s (bits vs bytes). You could likely stream 10 4k UHD movies at once from a single HDD before running into bandwidth issues and with the cost of SSDs versus HDDs, it’s almost a no-brainer to go with an HDD.
I’m not mixing up units, but let me better explain what I mean. The max speed is only in a best case scenario with a single sequential reader, and that speed drops dramatically when adding other simultaneous operations because the read head needs to seek to different locations. Random read speeds regularly test at less than 1MB/s, and even though multiple sequential streams wouldn’t be random, it’d still require plenty of seek time.
I did a little testing on a drive I have here just now to make sure I’m not completely full of shit. Single stream read was about 120MB/s and I was surprised how well it handled multiple read streams. My drive could handle roughly 9 sequential read streams from different locations on the drive while staying above 10MB/s, so while it wasn’t reaching its max speed, it wasn’t horrible, matched your expectations almost exactly. The real killer, though, was writing. If I added in a single write stream, the read speed dropped to about 1.5MB/s because it seemed to strongly prioritize writing over reading. Maybe some configuration could improve this? Interestingly, adding more readers improved this, but only up to about 4.5MB/s.
My results shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s just one drive and me mucking around with dd, but I think still illustrative of what I was alluding to, that if you are using a single HDD for multiple things simultaneously, the performance can suffer badly. Actual performance will depend on its use, of course, and honestly the results are way better than I expected, so this isn’t likely a realistic concern at all unless you will be constantly writing large amounts of data to the drive.
Thanks for calling me out on this, these are really interesting results, I think.
Thanks for the detailed answer! :) Indeed, I read that I would be limited in storage size if choosing the internal option. That said I am not sure I will be using more than 4tb in the next months, considering also that I don’t have the need for 4k videos at the moment. Would it be a “waste” to just go for an internal ssd to start, and then upgrade to a larger hdd (external) in the future?
Also, sorry just to clarify, when you say
Make sure you’re not writing logs or anything like that to it, it should be on demand use only
Does downloading media to the drive still counts as a viable thing to do? And I guess the on demand use would be e.g. streaming.
Sorry, on demand is not a good way to state this, it’s just how my weird mind thinks of things. By “on demand”, I mean, like you are actively using it to store something or view something. If you’re not intentionally doing something with it, the drive should be completely idle. That’s more of a target than a requirement, though. It’s a way to keep storage drives tidy and not littered with temporary cache files, or databases used to store runtime state by various services. It’s just a strategy I like to take, to keep bulk storage separated from the applications and services that use it.
Even if a usb drive is intended to be permanently attached, it should still be treated as a temporary component. The reason is so that if something happens and the drive is disconnected, it limits the disruption to the system. You lose your media and documents until it’s reattached, of course, but the computer keeps chugging along happily.
If you use it for writing log files, then its loss can disrupt those services (and also prevent the problem from being reported). Also it’ll be constantly making noise, which can be annoying.
That’s my reasoning, anyway, you might prefer it done differently.
No worries! I think I got what you meant, just wanted to make sure. I agree with you to separate storage from apps and systems, in this way if something goes wrong with the main drive (I think) I should also be able to restore the system and not lose any downloaded media or data.
SATA is more reliable than USB. And SSDs are faster, but more expensive than a harddrive. In the end all of this is possible. You need to see how much space you need and what you can afford. Unless you need it to be quiet/silent or super fast, a regular harddrive might do.
Thanks for the answer! Absolutely, as I said in another comment I don’t think I can push more than 4tb with the inside drive. I found a crucial ssd for that size at a relatively reasonable price (~260€), I might just wait a little bit to increase the budget and go with that and don’t worry about it for a while
I just bought the same computer and put an SSD in the internal slot. It’s been fine so far but it hasn’t been long enough to give any advice.
I’ve hosted Plex for years using external HDDs without issue. There is a bit of a delay when starting a stream, but nothing I can’t live with.
