[Question] Should I switch to a Raspberry Pi or just buy a new HDD?
Hi,
I'm running the Nextcloud snap on my dad's 12 year old laptop (hp elitebook 8470w) but it has some performance issues. It fails to load for half a minute pretty often.
I'm considering buying a rPi 5 instead to run a few things:
The CPU in that laptop is very likely still faster than a Rasberry PI 5 (and for sure faster than a RPI4).
I would replace the HDD with a SATA SSD drive.
Maybe also see if the DVD drive can be pulled out and replaced with an adapter for another SATA connector.
Edit: the error is a bit cryptic, but the SMART result of the drive actually looks not so bad. But running especially the Nextcloud Postgres database on a SSD will help a lot (I hope you are not using the SQLite option).
Thanks for the answer. HDD Sentinel also says the disk is in good shape, but it hangs for a minute very often and is very cumbersome to use this way. I'm using the snap, so MySql
It might be the SATA controller that has an issue, hard to figure out. In that case you will probably have no choice but to replace the hardware. But IMHO in nearly all cases an old laptop is more convenient for beginner self-hosting than a RPi.
I would also replace the harddrive with an SSD (and maybe replace it (mini) pc once you can afford it). With a Pi you run your OS from an sd-card which can work for some time but isn't ideal from what I've heard.