Aid on Optimal Fresh Install

[wallwimd]

heyo, complete and utter noob to this. have worked with linux before and got recommended proxmox for my needs albeit thrown in it somewhat blindly, so sorry if i botch up or mix up terms. also, any and all help is greatly appreciated!

going through a fresh install, the system im putting it on has a 1 tb m.2 nvme ssd and two 4 tb hdds. would the most optimal approach here be making the ssd the boot drive while utilizing RAIDZ1, mirror the hard drives together (not sure what the option would be for installation in this case), or invest in another hard drive to make it easier on me with some other configuration. once again, thanks for any help.

 

[Impact]

That depends what you goal is. What kind of data do you want to store? Do you use VMs or CTs? Does it need to be fast data? Which disk models do you use?

 

[leesteken]

RAIDz1 and HDDs are the exact opposite of getting high IOPS for active VM disks. Proxmox does not need an SSD for itself as speed is not important and it writes a lot (so and old HDD is fine). Maybe search the forum a bit about RAIDz1 and PLP to learn about ZFS?

 

[fstrankowski]

You can think of RaidZ1 as Raid5 implementation in ZFS. Would you mix SSD and spinning HDDs in an usual Raid5? Nope, you would not.

I'd advise you to either get a second m.2 drive to build a proper mirrored Raid for Proxmox + VMs - or - regularly backup the VMs onto the HDDs (which you also put into a mirror) and still use the m.2 for Proxmox and the VMs.

 

[louie1961]

In your situation I would use the two 4TB drives in a mirror, and I would install there and use the extra space for data storage, backup space, etc. I would put the VM storage on the NVME drive. It would be better if there were two NVME drives that could be mirrored, but it is what it is.

Procedurally, I would install to the two 4TB drives, then add the NVME as a second pool after install.