I've been halfheartedly looking for something like this for a while, and wondered if any of the corporate IT types frequenting the forum knew better than I... I'm looking to upgrade my offsite storage, which is currently a Raspberry Pi 2 with a 1TB WD PiDrive - and pretty much full. It's acting as remote storage for a 6TB mirror, but that's nowhere near full - 2TB would do fine, 4TB would give me room for growth. 'cos it's going on a shelf in the entrance to my mum's house, though, it has to be compact. I thought I'd found the solution when I picked up the NESPi4 case: it takes a 2.5" SATA drive and converts it to USB. Stick a 4TB 2.5" spinning-rust drive in there, job's a good 'un! No. Turns out it needs a 7mm drive, whereas the bigger-capacity 2.5" mechanical drives are 9mm or above. I've also got the new Argon One M.2, which - as the name suggests - takes a SATA M.2 drive. It's a better case than the NESPi4, though less interesting-looking, so using that would be perfect. What I need, then, is a 7mm 2.5" or M.2 SSD ≥4TB. Price is key: I literally couldn't give two hoots about performance, 'cos it's hanging off a Raspberry Pi and will be limited to my 20Mb/s upstream anyway. I'm always writing about new high-capacity SSDs for the server market, but when it comes to finding one... I'm struggling. Ideas welcomed. Alternatively, if anyone can recommend a Raspberry Pi case with one power input that'd take a 3.5" drive, even better.
Ah timing, you just missed on the Amazon Prime Samsung QVOs 4TB SSDs @ £250, of course whether you consider that cheap is another matter but I have not seen cheaper, these go for about £320 normally which is still reasonable for 4Tb Unfortunately 4TB M2s on NVMe seem to be an over expensive bump up in price, a fair bit more than 2x 2TB, so I still use many 2Tbs, There are 7mm 2.5inch caddy for Sata M2 SSD that will give you two slots but the cost of the caddy make the 4TB above more cost effective unless you happen to have some M2 SATA already, I don't think I have seen 4Tb m2 sata.
Agreed. 4TB+ m.2 drives seem to be nvme only and on this side of the pond start at $600. Mine is a different use case but it's the reason I bought a 4TB WD Sata SSD for $340 all-in, as I can install my entire Steam (& EA,GOG etc.) with half of it to spare vs a 2nd m.2 drive. Mechanical 2.5" HDDs greater than 2TB just don't exist in sub 9.5mm, I guess as we're talking 3+ platters. I bought a 5TB Seagate 2.5" drive for use with my as Xbox for storage and recently extracted it when the SATA>USB circuitry failed for reuse in my new desktop. it's a 15mm drive - and no internal 2.5" drive I've seen is thinner. SATA SSD seems like the only way to go, or a 3.5" HDD. Turns out my 4TB WD SSD is 7mm, the WDS400T2B0A. I know you're in the UK but for reference here's the newegg link for it. In the UK Scan want £380 for it. If performance is irrelevant, @Gareth Halfacree I suggest you go with sandys suggestion of the 870QVO, 4TB for £323. Cases that take 3.5" drives are pretty scarce. I found this one from a US website I've never been to before for $28 +Tax but nothing from the UK.
You can get 7mm dual m.2 SATA to 2.5" drive enclosures. They ain't exactly cheap, but you could drop a couple of 2TB SATA m.2 sticks in one of those.
Cheers, all. Looks like my best bet is the Samsung QVO - looks like it's £280-ish at the mo', which ain't too bad. Or I might spend £90 on a 4TB 2.5" spinning-rust USB drive, see if the Pi's got the grunt to drive it without a powered hub. Velcro the damn thing to the top of the case. Pretty? No. Cheaper? Hells yes.
Ended up doing... this. Just over £80 on a 4TB WD portable USB drive, existing Raspberry Pi 4 and Argon One case, works a treat. It's currently sucking down about 800GB of files onto a force-compressed btrfs partition via Syncthing, happy as Larry. As neat as a one-box solution? No. Cheaper? Absolutely.
Oh, and for the curious: the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB with 4TB WD portable USB hard drive draws 0.84A idle but spinning, spikes to 1.2-1.7A under load, and sits at 0.69A with the hard drive spun down. That's all at 5.2V external supply, so call it 4.4W idle and spinning, 3.6W true idle, peak 8.84W. Not too shabby, that. Got it configured to spin the hard drive down after an hour of inactivity - figured that struck a good balance between having the poor drive constantly spinning up and down and wasting energy overnight when I'm probably not touching any of the synchronised files... EDIT: Disabled Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and HDMI, and got it down to 0.64A at idle - 3.3W. Can't get much lower without faffing around underclocking and doing stupid things like disabling the status LEDs, I reckon.
