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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

There is such a thing as good enough. For instance, are you trying to watch a two hour movie in five minutes, or two hours?

For most things, particularly video streaming, 100 Mbps is more than enough. If you want faster, a Pi 4 can saturate gigabit with mirrored storage on USB. You don't need dedicated SATA ports to do that.

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I've tried to use a pi as a cloud storage but I just couldn't find a usable setup. SFTP mounts are unreliable and slow, NFS is insecure so can't be exposed over the internet, Nextcloud had the best UI but run like a dog on the pi 4.

I eventually built a full x86 desktop but found nextcloud is slow with any amount of processing power. Put 20k photos in a directory and it just stops functioning.

Gave up and went with Google Drive.

20k files in one directory could hit filesystems hard in general - not only a PHP app on top of that

They don’t really present any alternatives. I wouldn’t care if internally it split it in to multiple directories and presented it as one in the UI.

Performance is important but my main problem is reliability of the usb to SATA controllers.

In practice you often get weird timeout issues and unintelligible errors in kernel logs, hard resets, drives disconnecting or worst, data corruption. It's also always difficult to tell if it is a failing drive, or if it's a controller bug, or power supply issue.

Does SMART work over usb? If not how are you alerted of drive problem?

This is another thing that really depends on the USB to SATA controller you use.

Some are OK, some are great, and some are garbage before they make it to a warehouse shelf.

It depends on the USB-SATA adapter. Yes, I get some SMART data using smartctl. I also get alerted if a pending write takes longer than a few ticks, which would indicate issues.

The primary issue with USB-SATA is power. Give a good USB-SATA adapter, the drive, and the host computer good power, and you'll see excellent reliability.

My 1U Raspberry Pi server with two mirrored spinning rust disks on USB-SATA has been up continuously since September and has been busy with running SearXNG, DNS, email, web (including dynamic sites), MySQL, and so on, while also being used to compile while heavily going in to swap.

In other words, it has been doing non-stop disk I/O since September without an issue.

This is because everything in the machine has excellent power :)

You get that with cheap PCIe SATA ones too, gotta watch out. I eventually traced my NAS problems to that, shitty controller (I had 4 ports off mobo + 2 extra off controller)

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