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?

  • @talEnglish
    17•2 months ago

    For any computer today, server or no, I’d probably default to SSD today unless I expected to be making use of a large store of files that I expected to access in serial, like a large movie collection or maybe a backup server that can play well with rotational drives.

    The only thing there that looks like it could be doing that is the Samba server, depending upon what the remote clients are doing with it (could be a movie server).

    In general, if you can fit your stuff on an SSD today, I’d get an SSD.

    You also can also add a rotational drive down the line if you run low on space and need inexpensive space for something that you’re going to access in serial, and use both; just move the bulk stuff to the rotational drive then.