I have an external 1.5TB USB HDD on this Odroid N2+. It is always somewhat busy since I have a torrent client running as a daemon. I noticed recently that the HDD gets super hot.
Is there some other stoage medium I can use to prevent this? I know nerds like to use NAS or something like that but it seems super expensive and overkill as I don't really need that much space since I am not a compulsive hoarder.
The SBC does not have anything like SATA ports or whatever they are called so my only two options are eMMC and something that works over USB. eMMCs are hard to come by where I live. So I am thinking something like a USB SSD could work here? Thoughts?
Thank you.
Don't know if this will be a problem, but I had a setup like this on the original Raspberry Pi and discovered to my complete dismay that the Ethernet and the USB ports shared the same bus. IO on the network would stall IO on the drive and vice-versa. Even though it was a 100mbps ethernet link, streaming topped out at 500kb/s due to contention over IO resources.
I haven't faced this yet. Both network and USB data transfer work at expected speeds.
I have multiple SBCs of various origin. I use a USB/SATA adapter and run SSDs over USB. I use adapters that draw power over USB and some that also draw power from their own dedicated wall wart.
My bananapi and the rasp pi’s have no issue powering the SSD over USB, given a wallwart with ample current overhead (5v 4a supplies seem to work great). The orangepi, is a different story. All sorts of issues unless I’m using a USB/SSD adapter with its own power source.
Odroid N2+ can power an external HDD on its own. Any idea if there is a significant difference between using an "external USB SSD" vs. using a normal SATA SSD with an USB enclosure/adapter?
Throughput wise? Likely not. USB is going to be the choke point probably so there shouldn’t be a discernible difference. There may be a price difference in the two, since most of the USB drives I’ve had my hands on tend to be SATA drives with the adapter built into the enclosure. I think you might pay a bit more for the prebuilt drive/enclosure versus DIYing it but I haven’t bought drives or adapters in a few years so I couldn’t tell wrt current pricing.
So I am thinking something like a USB SSD could work here? Thoughts?
It'll work. Your SSD will be bottlenecked by the USB connection, but you probably won't notice for torrenting.
not really.
ssd might be cooler but then you have other problems. you need to cool your hard drive. you could use an enclosure with a fan in it or just put it in the path of fan air from your sbc if its got a fan.
have you looked at smartctl -a /dev/[your_hdd_here] |grep Temperature or hddtemp /dev/[your_hdd_here]?
that'll tell you if it's actually super hot on the inside and what that hot temperature is.
