As a matter of interest, how much capacity do you need? You could buy a two slot NVMe adaptor + two 4 TB NVMe SSDs at a reasonable price for a total of 8 TB.
Depends on your definition of reasonable and whether you want branded M.2 drives or not.
Do you have existing disks to reuse? The hat you mention takes 2.5 inch disks. The hat makes more sense if you already own some 2.5 inch disks.
Magnetic disks? I cannot find a 2.5 inch CMR disk anywhere. SMR disks crash into a write roadblock that makes them slower than paper tape. I am replacing my last SMR disk with SSD because SMR is too slow for any creature living less than 5000 years.
Depends on your usage. I wouldn't want my OS on SMR but for data the is written infrequently but read often it should be fine. If I was doing lots of small, random I/O I'd want SSD anyway.
SATA III is the same speed as USB 3. If you want big capacity, use two 3.5 inch CMR disks in externally powered USB enclosures. You could have RAID 1 of 16 TB or 20 TB. There are USB adaptors for several extra USB ports.
On a Pi5, I'd use two enclosures - one on each USB3 port. You'll get more bandwidth per drive that way. (Four PCie lanes between RP1 and SoC compared to the single lane for that HAT). But given the on board network is capped at 1Gbps that may not matter. It may not make much difference at 2.5Gbps either.
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Thu Jul 10, 2025 12:39 am