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?
You’re weighing speed & energy usage vs cost. With a small array, HDDs power draw difference probably won’t amount to much and you may hit the RPi’s I/O bottleneck before fully benefiting from SSDs speeds, though latency would be better.
But TL;DR: If your goal is to learn and build something cheap, go HDD. If you hate it, you can upgrade over time.
