Hello, it’s me again. I read a lot about how unreliable micro SD cards are if you use your RPi to selfhost some stuff. Now I wanted to ask if some of you might have recommendations for cheap but reliable external SSDs. I did some research on Amazon but there are some brands I never heard before (Intenso, SSK, Netac, etc.) and don’t know if they can be trusted.
Do you want reliable, or do you want cheap? You must choose 1 from that list.
If you’re not planning on putting anything critical on it and you’re doing backups, and you don’t mind being without its use for however long it would take you to replace it if it dies, pick anything.
I’ve never had an SSD die on me Yet but I don’t buy cheap brands though I don’t buy top of the range and I usually buy at a good deal. Crucial MX has been reasonably priced in the past.
Crucial is fine but IIRC the 1TB+ variants are too good to be true (cheap) and will die quite fast. Just a note for everyone to look into the underlying technology on the particular model.
I’ve a number of 1GB + 2GB models. Admittedly none in the last 3 years but some are 8+ years going strong. I know of some others with no issues but maybe I’ve been lucky
I stumbled upon the Crucial BX, do you think that one is not reliable enough? Because I think I use that in my PC atm and it runs fine. But it’s not a home server so there is probably less load on this one.
Crucial is fine. It’s commonly found in corporate and government workstations.
Don’t have much personal experience with BX but they’re probably fine. But once you have backups of anything you care about the worst that can happen is you need to restore those backups. If its running a service you can’t do without then maybe a backup pi?
I have RPis running on SD cards for years with no issues so realistically you probably won’t have any either but better to be prepared than not. And it also means that if you mess something up you can restore it to when it worked.