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0 pointsadastra223mo ago0 comments

MB and other elements are more concerning than the drives.

0 comments

For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern.

When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves

bostik3mo ago

Don't skimp on the power supply either. A dodgy PSU can torch all devices attached to it.

How do I know? I've had two drives and one MB fail in quick succession thanks to a silently failing power supply.

aynyc3mo ago

You actually want reliable MB & RAM to ensure data doesn't get corrupted in memory first. Since you have various ways of writing data to disks that offer you resiliency.

embedding-shape3mo ago

Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority.

Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before.

What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.

adastra22OP3mo ago

Not sure why you are being downvoted. The MB is a single point of failure in this system, the drives are not.

I’ve experienced many drive failures over the years, but never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the other hand has wiped out my entire system.

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