I run mine with the actual photos on HDD but the database on SSD. So far everything has been near instantaneous for loading, downloading, uploading, you name it.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
17 points (75.8% liked)
Selfhosted
40445 readers
941 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Same.
Noticeable difference loading the page? Loading photos? Uploading photos?
Photo files are relatively small, so an HDD is absolutely fine.
relatively small
Until you dump 2000 RAW photos on there
We don't need to know your pron prefs, pal!
Meh, even then. If they're 60MB each that's only 120GB.
It depends on the load on the disk. My main docker host pretty well has to be on the SSD to not complain about access times, but there are a dozen other services on the same VM. There's some advisory out there that things with constant IO should avoid SSDs to not wear out the read/write too fast, but I haven't seen anything specific on just how much is too much.
Personally I split the difference and run the system on SSD and host the bulk data on a separate NAS with a pile of spinning disks.
Usually* there is a database for the file meta-data that will benefit from faster access times of a SSD, the files themselves can be on a HDD.
*not sure how Immich specifically does it.
I use a HDD for my immich instance. I have a feeling it might have made the initial import process quicker (complete google photos dump). However, general usage, I have found zero bottlenecks.
Unless somethkng changed in the last few years, SSDs are much much faster.
They are, but I think the question was more "does the increased speed of an SSD make a practical difference in user experience for immich specifically"
I suspect that the biggest difference would be running the Postgres DB on an SSD where the fast random access is going to make queries significantly faster (unless you have enough ram that Postgres can keep the entire DB in memory where it makes less of a difference).
Putting the actual image storage on SSD might improve latency slightly, but your hard drive is probably already faster than your internet connection so unless you've got lots of concurrent users or other things accessing the hard drive a bunch it'll probably be fast enough.
These are all Reckons without data to back it up, so maybe do some testing
Considering the database itself is relatively small, PostgreSQL could end up largely caching it in memory, so even hosting the DB on an HDD might not feel much slower.