Hello, it’s me again. I read a lot about how unreliable micro SD cards are if you use your RPi to selfhost some stuff. Now I wanted to ask if some of you might have recommendations for cheap but reliable external SSDs. I did some research on Amazon but there are some brands I never heard before (Intenso, SSK, Netac, etc.) and don’t know if they can be trusted.
I’m using a couple of cheap Kingston A400 for my setup (120 and 480 GB) and they work just fine. One thing I noticed is that the 120 GB one’s health went down to 92%, from 100%, in “just” one year (smart parameter). But that’s implies a lifetime of more that 12 years, so I’m not excessively concerned.
EDIT: of course, just after writing this comment the smaller SSD began to behave strangely (errors in dmesg).
Are you using SATA to USB adapters? If yes, which one work well?
I have a couple of no-brand SATA-USB enclosers with some jmicron chipset. Can’t remember the exact chipset right now, as my RPi is not working ATM (see edit).
You can go with something like this if you want a clean solution.
I use a drive dock station for my backup drives, and I have a few of these for one-offs too.
Yeah, I use something like this, a no-brand enclosure.
Is there a one-line command to check my SSD? I have a headless setup. When I’ve tried on the past there was more results coming back than I knew what to do with.
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX should do the job
Thank you, that worked!
YW 😄