NAS/NVR SSD+HDD storage setup

[IronicMike]

Hi All,

I have the following hardware at hand:
- motherboard with 5xSATA and 1xNVME
- 16GB RAM
- i5-7500
- 512 GB NVME SSD
- 256 GB SATA SSD
- 3x10TB SATA HDD (leaving 1 SATA connector empty)

I want to set a Proxmox machine to provide:
- NAS (light home use - laptop backups, old media)
- NVR
- HomeAssistant
- PhotoPrism (if possible)
- some other light stuff

For the 3 HDD I am thinking RAIDz1. I do not know how to handle setting the rest of the storage (2 SSD's + 1 SATA available (additional SSD?) + USB?) given the NAS and NVR use. I would like for the HDDs to be off most of the time - ideally the data would be written to SSDs and transferred to HDDs when the allocated space runs out.

How should I approach this - is there a NAS solution that handles the above scenario? (GUI preferred - I am not proficient with CLI)

Thanks for any help, I appreciate it.

 

[Dunuin]

I would like for the HDDs to be off most of the time - ideally the data would be written to SSDs and transferred to HDDs when the allocated space runs out.

Once you set up those HDDs in PVE it will poll them every few seconds keeping the HDDs spinning 24/7. If you don't want that I wouldn't use those HDDs directly with PVE but pass them through into a NAS VM, share them via NFS/SMB and mount those SMB/NFS shares inside other VMs or privileged LXC so they can access/store data there.

In my opinion it isn't worth using non-redundant disks. So I would not use the NVMe or at least don't store any data on it you care about or data that will crash something in case that NVMe SSD dies. Instead I would get another SATA SSD (or replace both in case those aren't recommended ones for your workload) and create a mirror. Or in case you got a free PCIe 4x slot you could get one of those M.2 carrier cards for a second M.2 slot for a faster mirror.

 

[IronicMike]

Once you set up those HDDs in PVE it will poll them every few seconds keeping the HDDs spinning 24/7. If you don't want that I wouldn't use those HDDs directly with PVE but pass them through into a NAS VM, share them via NFS/SMB and mount those SMB/NFS shares inside other VMs or privileged LXC so they can access/store data there.

In my opinion it isn't worth using non-redundant disks. So I would not use the NVMe or at least don't store any data on it you care about or data that will crash something in case that NVMe SSD dies. Instead I would get another SATA SSD (or replace both in case those aren't recommended ones for your workload) and create a mirror. Or in case you got a free PCIe 4x slot you could get one of those M.2 carrier cards for a second M.2 slot for a faster mirror.

Great, thanks for the guidance. I get it with the 3xHDD pool managed by NAS (with the disks passed through to the NAS software).

I need some clarification on the SSD front. I understand the need for redundancy, is it possible to mirror NVME and SATA SSDs? I am not worried about performance.

Should I be installing both proxmox and VMs on that mirror or is there a better approach? Will such a setup allow NAS to use the SSDs for writing data before transferring them to HDDs (to let them sleep even though NVR is running)?
-

 

[Dunuin]

I need some clarification on the SSD front. I understand the need for redundancy, is it possible to mirror NVME and SATA SSDs? I am not worried about performance.

With software raid like ZFS yes. But the faster NMVe SSD will be slowed down to the performance of the SATA SSD as writes need to be acknowledged by both for a write to complete.

Should I be installing both proxmox and VMs on that mirror or is there a better approach?

If you don't want to waste two more SATA ports for dedicated system disk I would store system + virtual disks on the same disks.

Will such a setup allow NAS to use the SSDs for writing data before transferring them to HDDs (to let them sleep even though NVR is running)?

You could store a virtual disk on those SSD and let the VM store stuff on that virtual disk. But keep in mind that you can't mount that virtual disks on two VMs at the same time to share files. So I would create a virtual disk for the NAS VM on those SSDs and then let the NAS VM share stuff on that fast virtual disk via SMB/NFS too.