Hi!
2 of my drives failed recently (as well as an external drive), plus my faithful HP Proliant Gen 8 is ripe for retirement (I’m small potatoes compared to you guys).
So I bought a mini-PC (with a N100). I’m considering going all SSDs.
What are the cheapest ones? They can be slow.
Is there a “storage SSD” category?
I’ve looked at OEMs but they’re not that interesting, or I didn’t know where to look.
Aliexpress is full of fakes. As is the second hand market. Or it’s legit but as expensive as new.
Thanks for reading!
one thing to consider is that some cheap SSDs don’t have power management, so they’ll consume way more power than others at idle.
For a server setup that’s always running you should consider if the slightly lower cost is worth the cost of electricity
At idle, SSD is usually better (like you said if the SSD has proper power management, and that takes research to know).
Spinning platters are generally still better for power per gig/terabyte, because write time they consume less power than SSD.
I dont really look at drive power consumption, because even with ~10 drives running in my environment, a single cpu doing anything moderate blows away their power consumption numbers (I’ve tested, not that it was needed, heat dissipation alone makes it clear).
I have a ten-year old 5 drive NAS that runs 24/7, and it’s barely above room temp. Average draw is a few watts (the number was so low I put it out of my mind, maybe 5 watts - Raspberry Pi territory).
My SFF desktop is 12w at idle, with either 2 small SSDs (500GB each) or a single large drive (12TB). So much for SSD having better idle power.
Thanks. Yes power consumption is important, so I’ll keep that in mind!
Is there a specific term I should look for, or simply “power management”?
if this is a sata drive “SATA link power management” might work?
ik tomshardware reviews of SSDs have information on power consumption