If you’re only looking for 1TB, go with an SSD. It’s about the same price. It’s only when you’re looking for >1TB that HDD starts to get substantially cheaper.

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 don’t think an SSD is the right choice here. SSDs have a limited lifespan that’s majority driven by the number of writes that happen to a certain block. Reads are cheap and near infinite though.

When you’re talking about a Lemmy instance, mail server, etc. my mind thinks this is likely to be many writes with several read-once ops. This is a better use case for a HDD.

A media server that oriented towards most consumption (reading) would be better for SSD.

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.

For running apps? SSD. For large amounts of data storage? HDD.

I use a combination of both. SSD’s to store read/write intensive data. In my case, I run multiple VM’s and store the primary VHD’s on SSD’s. HDD’s for stuff where space matters more than speed, like digital media and local backups.

Why not split the difference and do both. Hdd for storage and SSD for services/containers. To help with the power load/performance hit I’d recommend using a usb to sata adapter that has external power. Overall though it sounds like a micro optipl x would be great for you. They’re cheap, more powerful, but still sip power, and usually can fit nvme and 2.5" drives together.

Take that $100, buy multiple drives, and make a RAID.

Raspberry pi is power limited. HDD creates a power spike on boot as well so you may have power issues. When i used a rpi for a media server, i had to use a 25W supply. Even 20W wasnt enough and i had voltage throttling issues. 1TB HDD probably wont draw that much power but SSD is never an issue. If you dont need space and are on a budget SSD is the way to go. This is all assuming USB is used for power.

If you need large amounts of space and have a budget, use an HDD but it needs to be self powered or used with a larger device like a mini pc which has adequate internal power.

You can get an older model Samsung Evo 1tb SSD new for under $100. Those have been good drives for me.

You can probably find something to shuck used if you don’t care too much for reliability.

Regardless, get a second disk even something attached to your main PC to handle backups.

RPi are nice, but imo are getting expensive and if you aren’t using the i/o pins just not worth it. If I were to just start out again I’d pickup a used laptop. Higher specs than a RPi and built in battery backup.