friends dont let friends run mail servers. id recommend no on that one

While I run my own Lemmy instance, I can say with 100% certainty - do not host a Lemmy instance on your own hardware.

It’s tempting, and I did, but don’t. The reason? CSAM. Your hosting stuff for other people, and if someone uploads something horrible to another instance, that is federated with you. That means now you are hosting that content.

The feds then have full rights to kick down your door and seize your hardware. On the cloud however, they’ll seize your VM , but your home stuff is okay.

Hosting Lemmy is great - but it’s something you really have to think about. Hosting your content is awesome, fun, and rewarding. I’ve learned hosting other people’s content is… Not as fun.

You’re weighing speed & energy usage vs cost. With a small array, HDDs power draw difference probably won’t amount to much and you may hit the RPi’s I/O bottleneck before fully benefiting from SSDs speeds, though latency would be better.

But TL;DR: If your goal is to learn and build something cheap, go HDD. If you hate it, you can upgrade over time.

Highly recommend SSD if just for Lemmy. Man, the syncing can take a while. I have HDD with a m.2 cache and it can still take a while. Personally, I’d go for something a little more powerful, but it’s all fun and educational.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #863 for this sub, first seen 11th Jul 2024, 02:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

For any computer today, server or no, I’d probably default to SSD today unless I expected to be making use of a large store of files that I expected to access in serial, like a large movie collection or maybe a backup server that can play well with rotational drives.

The only thing there that looks like it could be doing that is the Samba server, depending upon what the remote clients are doing with it (could be a movie server).

In general, if you can fit your stuff on an SSD today, I’d get an SSD.

You also can also add a rotational drive down the line if you run low on space and need inexpensive space for something that you’re going to access in serial, and use both; just move the bulk stuff to the rotational drive then.

I’m running a Raspberry Pi 4 with an array of hard disks. Essentially the entire OS is on a small SSD but because I have so much data I’ve got two traditional HDD drives with XFS and LUKS disk encryption.

I’d say overall it works fantastically, over 802.11ax and Samba I’m pushing about 600-700 Mbps while transferring to the HDD drives.

First things first, unless you are strictly mailing yourself or you plan on having discussions with google/microsoft/apple… dump the mail Idea, Trust me it’s not worth it and probably won’t work.

Second for what you want almost everything will be held in ram and the drive won’t matter except boot time, I say almost because you want a samba server so the question quickly becomes how much data do you have and how much money are you willing to spend. I would make the argument that the boot drive should always be ssd but the rest is a matter of patience and money

TLDR: don’t bother with Email, boot is ssd and reset hdd unless you’re rich or not much data.

For that size and given it’s a pi, maybe just a cheap usb stick

couple of old 2.5 HDD + usb to SATA converter. But Pi5 is hardly suitable to host anything. May just get old PC (which gives you HDD too). There are plenty for < $100 or even free. But you are going to pay more for power.