Hard Drive Conundrum

J

JayK

Member
Jun 11, 2022
10
1
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Well I got myself in a situation. I have been running Proxmox on a single 500GB HDD for years. That's everything (OS, VM's...). It's worked fine, but is too small. I just picked up a Poweredge R720XD for free as an upgrade and am finally dealing with my small HDD situation. I did a quick search and it seemed that an SSD would be fine, mind you I will still be using a single drive for everything for budget reasons. I keep backups and if the machine goes down it's not the end of the world. So I buy a 2TB WD Blue SSD and now I start seeing that an SSD is bad due to lots of log writes and ZFS write multiplication, unless you use an enterprise SSD, which I don't. Now I don't want to use it. So I decided to switch it with the 2TB HDD in my main PC. Then I realize I bought that before I knew what SMR was. So I look it up. Data sheet says it's TGMR. What the hell is that? Can't really find any information on it. I do have a 3TB 5400 RPM CMR drive lying around, and I have a 4TB 7200 RPM CMR drive as my main USB external. This is way overkill for my Proxmox needs, and I don't want to pull it from its current use if I don't have to. So I'm stuck. I don't have the budget for another drive. I have a choice, consumer SSD, 5400 RPM, TGMR (whatever that is), or my overkill external. Any guidance on this would be very much appreciated.
 
I dont think SMR lowers endurance, its mainly a performance negative. But it typically isnt suited for RAID setups for this reason. Might be ok as a single drive storage, but not if its part of a RAID.
If using an SSD for proxmox, you probably want either an enterprise or at least something over spec'd. there is tricks to lower the level of data written, but of course they are unsupported.
Even a used enterprise probably beats a new consumer for SSD assuming its not completely ancient or damaged.
 
I think I'm just going to avoid SSDs in this machine all together. I'm not a fan of SMR, but the drive in question is TGMR. I don't know if this is going to be closer to SMR or CMR. I'm not doing any RAID. There will be zero redundancy in this machine... I know, be ready for disaster.

I think I'm going to make the 5400 RPM drive my new external, that will be annoying, the TGMR drive will go back in my main desktop, the 4TB will be the Proxmox drive, and I will have the SSD for another project. I really just want to know if this TGMR drive is going to be an issue as an OS drive as well as running my VMs. I'm not excited about wasting the capacity of the 4TB drive on Proxmox.
 
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