Yeah, it probably is - in terms of low overheads and electricity. Not great for long term, as SSDs can fail spectacularly, but if it's a staging post for cloud syncing or another device elsewhere rather than the ultimate endpoint, that's probably good.

To be fair, I'm way behind in this topic myself

[–] Dave 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

HDDs can fail too. I'd probably use a Raspberry Pi + SSD if putting it at someone else's house, since they will both be very quiet. I have a 14TB HDD at my house for backups, and it's pretty noisy.

If you really want redundancy you can use a mirrored array but for one backup of multiple I probably wouldn't, especially if there's a cloud backup in there.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is that mirrored array referring to RAID?

I literally have no knowledge in this stuff. Once you have something like this setup, how does it work? Once you configure it, does it automatically backup files in a certain location on your computer?, or do you manually move files onto it that you want to backup?

[–] Dave 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Oh man I'm gonna show my lack of knowledge too 🙂. I'll try anyway, but take everything I say with a grain of salt.

There are different types of RAID, but I believe RAID 1 would be a mirrored array. This Lemmy instance is on a ZFS mirrored array, but that's handled by the host so I don't have to understand it 🙃. I am not sure if the ZFS mirror is considered RAID but it's basically the same thing as RAID 1 (perhaps one is hardware one is software based?)

I see this setup as more of a redundancy for a live system so it can continue with one of the drives after a failure without downtime, and I probably wouldn't consider the mirrored drive a backup. But I'm no expert!

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 7 months ago

I always mean to do some more research into the topic, and never get past that stage lol. Maybe this time will be different... maybe.. lol

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is failure in SSD's more common than HDD's? Ideally I'd want to use it as my "offline" storage option, using it instead of my current external HDD that I use.

[–] Dave 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It seems SSDs are supposed to be more reliable than HDD, and but apparently they are only slightly better in practice.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 7 months ago

Hmm that's pretty interesting. I'd always assumed (I guess they were talking about reliability alot when SSD's became widely distributed) that they were a lot more robust.