2x RAID 1 - 1st system 2nd data

[Lipown]

Hi I must firstly state I never tried Proxmox but I will do to migrate all from RPI4 to home server.

I just need to ask some questions regarding power consumtion savings and dificulty settings RAID. How hard is to setup one RAID 1 of 2xSSD for the proxmox, vms etc and second RAID 1 of 2xHHDs for data? How I can do so please?

Would I really benefit from energy power savings since the HDDs for data will be accessed approx 1xweek or should I do only 1xRAID of HDDs and have all there?
I am running HA with some standart addons - AdGuard, z2m, mqtt etc. and I want to install to proxmox OpenMediaVault also (previously used only samba on pi). Thanks in advance!

 

[Dunuin]

For raid1 you got several options:
1.) onboard raid (most mainboards support that)
2.) HW raid (if you buy a raid card)
3.) ZFS (thats the only software raid the PVE Installer supports)
4.) Mdadm (only usable for your root if you install the PVE package ontop of a Debian)

For ZFS reliable hardware is recommended (alot of ECC RAM, enterprise SSDs, CMR HDDs and so on) but setting up two raid1 pools could be done using the GUI.

The more VMs/programs you run, the more IO your get. HDDs can only handle IOPS very bad and so they can be bottlenbecking very fast. So SSDs would make a way better VM storage.

 

[Lipown]

Thanks for your answer. I do not care much about performace since I believe it will be anyhow faster the Pi4 from SSD and it was fast enought for me. However I do care about power efficiency even about plus minus 5 watts. My Pi drawed 10-14 watts when running from ssd with another 2 x 3,5 drives spinned down.

I will probably go with 2xSDD 2xHDD. SD for proxmox and VMs, 2xHDD for VM and storage of Nextcloud and other storages.

 

[Dunuin]

If you care about power you shouldn't use HDDs at all. Especially because running a NAS will in most cases prevent the HDDs from entering standby. In a server you generally want your HDDs to spin 24/7 and a HDD need 5-17W and may even be 30W for a short time when doing stuff like spinning up. For SSDs it is way easier to enter standby because because there are no mechanical parts that need to spin up to 5700/7200/10000/15000 RPM each time a shared folder gets accessed.
Its also discussed if all that spin up/down and headparking will reduce the life expectation of the HDD compared to a full power 24/7 operation without any power saving enabled.