Hi all, a few months ago I got started with selfhosting. Installed Ubuntu Server on a HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini. It’s been great, running Jellyfin, Tandoor, Calibre-Web, and Miniflux. Everything is local access only.
The machine came with 1TB SSD and currently about 80% of that is taken. I’ve been searching around for good options to expand. While I’m relatively comfortable on the software side of things, I’m very inexperienced with and somewhat intimidated by hardware (but would love to learn a bit more).
What would be the most prudent way to expand storage? Is it simply replacing the existing SSD? Should I think of adding a NAS instead?
Buying new hardware would be ok, my only hard requirement is that I don’t want to run proprietary software/OS.
You must log in or register to comment.
My low cost solution has been adding external mechanical disks. Those go up to several TB for cheap, so I put two and sync them with rsync weekly in case one suddenly fails.
As others have wisely said, keep the fast SSD for your OS, media rarely changes and is usually accessed sequentially, it can live in slower disks.
It won’t make streaming slower unless you have multiple clients streaming, as in several.
I find the network to be the bottleneck - my gigabit network connection saturates with 3 streams, and I’m using a conventional hard drive for my media (OS is on an M2 drive). This doesn’t seem to affect the video quality though.
Frankly SSD is overrated for common stuff, there are other bottlenecks that usually hit us first, such as network or processing.
As you build out, make sure you consider backup in your costs, don’t spend your money just on storage.
Also, since you have a mini there may only be room for one drive internally and almost no cooling. Larger drives will have issues with heat.
It depends on how important your data is to you. Me personally, I just run a jellyfin server with dubiously acquired tv shows and movies. Which is to say that if I lost everything in a catastrophic failure, I wouldn’t much care, so I decided to get a refurbished 14tb USB connected external HDD.
If you run anything more important, you should listen to others who might have a more robust solution
I’ve considered this as well, as I already back my data up regularly. However, I read online that external disks aren’t good for long-term access. Have you run into any issues with that?
External failure rates are hit and miss because frankly, they often get abused.
I’ve had some last for 10 years, other for 2, and I’m not kind to mine.
I’d say they have 2 issues to deal with: temp and being dropped. The cases have no cooling, and larger drives need greater cooling than smaller drives.
I currently have 2 external drives (4 TB each) I use for local redundancy. When sync happens, they get quite warm, so I keep an old 80mm case fan on them. These are 5 year old drives that have been running this way for 3 years. SMART doesn’t report any errors or high temps, but without the fan I’m sure it would.
Add a second SSD, if the motherboard has a SATA port (I assume your current one is an NVMe drive). A SATA SSD is still more than fast enough as a second drive.
Moving to a bigger SSD also isn’t too difficult, as long as you have a system where you can have both the old and new SSD connected at the same time. It can be a different system if needed. Download Clonezilla onto a USB stick with Ventoy on it, and boot into it. Just make sure you have backups and do the clone in the correct direction (don’t clone the blank new drive onto the old one!!)
