Can you help me partition my new host ? (2xNVMe + 2xHDDs)

[lnxme]

Hello all,

I'have been testing Proxmox for 10 months on an old i7 4c 8t computer.
I used a 2Tb 3,5" spare sata HDD I had lying around.

I'am very satisfied with proxmox and I now want to install it on a brand new machine that will serve as a homelab computer.
I chose a low power low footprint micro computer base on Ryzen 7 6c 12t with 64Gb of ram. (minisforum HM80) and I managed to cram inside a few spare disk I had.
- 1TB crucial NVME disk (fast)
- 512 GB Kingston NVME disk (somewhat fast)
- 2x1Tb 2,5" sata hdd (very slow, not so sure about reliability)

I have read on those forums that proxmox tends to eat SSDs for breakfast. Mine are not pro, too expensive, and since I would prefer my setup to last for a long time without replacing my SSD too often, my idea was to create a mirror with my two HDDs, zfs1?, and install proxmox on them.
And use 1TB nvme for VMs and LXCs storage.
Then 512gb for the rest.. ISO, backup, etc..

My VMS will be backup up daily on an NFS server.

What do you think about this setup? I am missing someting? doing a mistake? forgot about something?
Any help and advices are welcome.


And happy new year!

 

[_gabriel]

forget zfs, install proxmox in ext4/lvm on nvme, forget vm daily backup without proxmox backup server at least alongside. a local ext4 datastore on hdd then why not a pbs sync to a second pbs datastore on the NFS.

 

[Dunuin]

Not PVE is killing those SSDs fast, it's usually the VMs/LXCs. So using the NVMes as a VM/LXC storage wouldn't be better.
SSDs will be damaged with each write. The more you write, the faster they will fail. And virtualization, CoW filesystems, mixed block sizes, nested filesystems, raid, encryption, workloads like DBs that do a lot of sync writes and so on will increase the write amplification, so a multiple of the actual data will be written to the disks, multiplying the wear. So a virtualized Windows in a VM will write way more than the same Windows installed bare metal. And when using virtualization, you probably want to run multiple OSs on the same machine. 10x Windows writing to a single SSD will of cause damage it more than 10x bare metal windows writing to one SSD each.

So I would use just the single 1TB SSD as LVM/LVM-Thin for both PVE system + VM/LXC storage. Do your daily backups and when that SSD fails get two Enterprise SSD with powerloss protection and enough durability, mirror them, install PVE again and restore your backups.
HDDs could be used in case you need some cold storage. But sounds lke you already got a NAS if you got a NFS share for the backups. So you could simply use that as your cold storage too.