this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Selfhosted

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Hmm. Let’s say I add 6 SSDs, 2TB each, for a total of 600€. In a RAID6 configuration, that gives me 8TB of storage. Compare that to a classical NAS with 2×8 TB HDDs for a total of 350€.

The HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total. Assuming 0.3€/kWh, over a span of 5 years, that is approximately 100€. The power consumption of the SSDs will be negligible.

So, just in terms of storage, the SSD solution is around 33% more expensive over 5 years. If you include the cost of the NAS itself, the price increment is even less noticeable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total

Whether your drives are idle is also a very use-case specific thing and I wouldn't spend any time trying to generalize based on that math as a "oh this is how it works for everyone".

In my case, I've got 5 drives all spun up at all times because of torrrent clients, Jellyfin users, and just general media acquisition and public content serving.

This thing would dramatically reduce my power footprint and save me giant buckets of money over it's lifespan while being smaller/faster IO performance/lower noise.

(My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so....)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so…

Ouch. I'm around 50W, and my HW isn't anything special: Ryzen 1700 + 2 HDDs + 1 SSD.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it's the drives and the controller for all the drives that are making the power usage what it is. I could replace some of the older drives with a newer one and be able to ditch the smaller drives and controllers, but it seems a waste to do that until they die.

Also, I wouldn't mind ditching for a Sufficient(TM) amount of nvme storage, but SSDs aren't actually getting cheaper and are probably going to do the opposite, so I'll likely end up doing uh, nothing,

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that's not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But that is neglecting the performance aspect.

Something like this can be very good for offloading large amounts of data onto a parity backed array either to be moved to a proper long term storage solution later or to be actively worked.

High resolution / bitrate footage comes to mind, where you may be offloading multiple cameras at once and need high write performance.

It's pretty unlikely that SSDs will have price parity with spinning rust anytime soon, but the value in them has always been performance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Yes, absolutely. Right now, SSDs are probably superior in comparison to HDDs in every category except for price (and long-term data integrity when switched off). But when you consider large parity raids and take into account the cost of electricity, even the price difference might only be small, making SSDs even more attractive.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago

You didn't count the cost of size and environmental damage.