PBS with different discs

[trigg3r]

I need to install PBS on a server with these 4 HDDs: 2TB, 2TB, 1TB, 500GB

I plan to use 2x2TB in ZFS RAID1 as S.O. and VM datastore and I would like to have some suggestions on how to use the other disks (perhaps I could dedicate the 1TB one to archiving files sent by "proxmox-backup-client"?)

Thanks for any advice

 

[UdoB]

Those HDDs being rotating rust? You know PBS prefers SSD for everything? (https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#recommended-server-system-requirements)

I would at least drop the 1TB+500GB disk and buy two small - say 64 or 128 GB - SSDs (if possible with PLP --> "Enterprise class") and use these as a (mirrored) special device. This way you can utilize the 2*2TB and get meta-data access with SSD-speed.

Just my 2 €¢...

 

[Dunuin]

While not great, with only 2 TBs of backup storage the GC at least should finish in unter 24 hours. So should be usable without special devices as nothing else imporant will be crippled when the HDDs are at 100% utilization for hours. But yes, performance won't be great and probably not suited for any productive use when fast restores are needed. Things like live restore won't be a valid option and you probably dont want to re-check the backups for integrity that often.

 

[trigg3r]

This is a machine that I recovered to start using PBS so for now I don't want to spend too much money on it, but I understand that without SDD disks it is difficult... The situation would improve somewhat with 2 external 2TB SSD disks connected via USB ?

 

[trigg3r]

the GC at least should finish in unter 24 hours

interesting... I hadn't thought about this yet, thanks!

 

[Dunuin]

interesting... I hadn't thought about this yet, thanks!

Yes, more problematic if you use these HDDs for something else too. Before adding the special device SSDs the GC task of a 1TB datastore needed 8 hours to finish. With scrub in parallel more like 12-16 hours. But I put my 1TB PBS datastore on a 24TB NAS via NFS share. So when the GC was running for 8-16 hours all the other 23TB of the NAS were basically not usable while PBS was doing some maintainance tasks as all the HDDs were at 100% utilization criping the performance to unusable levels.