If i want to run an Ubuntu server 24/7 with Plex and Qbit, would it make sense to use a hard drive as home/boot drive? Or is it better to use an SSD?
Is there any specific reason for using a HDD? Limit of disks supported by your server? Cost?
I second @[email protected] for using an SSD for streaming. Compared with the movies, the size of Ubuntu is relative small. Even if you can tolerate the boot up speed, I don’t think it worth the extra complexity of another HDD
EDIT: As OP in https://lemmy.ca/comment/372018 mentioned that OP already selected a 8TB HDD, I think it’s totally okay to use the HDD for system for simplicity.
My entire proxmox stack runs off of a hard drive that I wasn’t the first user of, and at some point I thought it had stopped working so I wrote “dead” on it. When building my server I needed a drive and I tried that one and it has served me well since (it is going to fail in less than 50 microseconds)
Since you’ll want to stream content rapidly off of the drive using Plex, I recommend getting an SSD for mass storage. Since you don’t care about boot speed (since you won’t be doing much of that) I’d recommend saving and getting a cheap HDD for the boot drive. Ideally 2 of them for redundancy.
If you’re running it 24/7 I’d recommend an SSD. For a boot drive it would be pretty cheap to get one. TBH the only situation i wouldn’t recommend an SSD is if you’re looking for more than 4TB of space.
I plan to have a 8-10TB HDD for media storage. So I guess ssd would still make sense (since the docker stuff will still be store on ssd)?
Yeah you’re gonna like the faster booting/upgrading. I would say if you’re dealing with that much data you should at the very least be running a RAID1. If you’re using more than one disk at least a RAID5. It seems like a waste of storage until your 8TB disk dies completely and you don’t have a backup.
If it’s ONLY for media storage though, I just rawdog it as a JBOD, since my media is gotten through the *arrs I figure I prefer the extra space and can easily just redownload stuff if I lose a drive since none of that data is critical
Yeah that makes sense. I’d rather not go through trouble of re-dowloading all of my stuff once you get above like a couple TB. I’ve got an old RAID5 running 6 3TB disks I bought used. I’ve had 2 fail (SMART prefail, not completely) over the past 5 years. For me, the money I saved on used disks let me buy more and still keep it protected. As with everything, it all depends on what you’re willing to lose.
It will work fine, if it takes a few seconds longer to boot, it really does it matter with a server. But I’d still separate the OS from the data drive, since you can get a 120gb SSD for $10, it’s a no brainer really, in case you need to reinstall the OS, you can leave the data untouched.
You can also backup data from the SSD to the HDD in case it fails.
But for simplicity and if you don’t really care about possibly losing data, running everything from a single HDD will work fine, most stuff will get loaded in RAM anyway, and run from there, it’s not like you’ll be launching new apps all the time.
