[Help] home dev server

[Bomdia]

I recently bought a minipc with ryzen 9 5900hx, 32gB 3200 ddr4 ram dual channel (16+16) dual layer (8chip for side) and an ssd sabrent rocket TLC pcie3.0 nvme 1tb,
I want to use this for making some lightweight vm's (redmine,code-server, mysql) and I readed that proxmox write a lot of access log for the api wearing the ssd, so I was thinking about the best solution for my need, I can additionally add 2 sata 2.5 hdd, and I have a nas(qnap arm not very performant cpu, 94mB/s with direct lan minipc <-> nas over smb) with raid 5 configuration of 4 hybrid nas shdd, the nas has 2 lan port 1 plugged into the router and one directly plugged into the minipc, the minipc is also plugged into the router, so I wandering if I can write the log into the nas, or if the best solution is installa promo into the her and not into the nvme ssd but use the nvme only for the vm's. If I wasn't clear about something feel free to ask

 

[bobmc]

My personal experience is that SSD wearout is not a big issue and I personally run a Sabrent Rocket 1TB Nvme drive in my own system for around 2 years 24/7 with wearout currently being less than 5%

I would advise you to buy two (or 3 if you want to have a spare on-hand) small SSD drives and install them as a ZFS mirror for the Proxmox boot drive - the only criteria is that they report Wearout / Lifetime via SMART so you can keep an eye on them. When they eventually start to approach >60% wearout (and this might take many months or even years) swap them as needed. If you swap one at a time, the system will rebuild.

I wouldn't use the SSD drives for VM's or container storage though, that I would dedicate to the NVME drive

 

[bobmc]

The Kingston drive has been in use for about 30 months, the Gigabyte drive has been in use about 7 months on a small system running a firewall router, access and wifi management and one Windows 10 remote desktop client for a remote office.

 

[Bomdia]

Thanks for the reply,
I still have some question:
1) the boot device speed impact the speed of a vm located in the nvme?
2) I have 2 mechanical disk spare but not a single ssd, i see from the screenshot that you have 2 ssd 120gb so i searched in this direction and i've found this ssd ( sorry for the site in italian ) what do you think about it?
3) I will prefer to not buy other hardware as i've already spent a great amount of money for the minipc so i'm carefully considerating performance vs lifetime vs money, ideally i want a system that just work for a great amount of time so i can concentrate on developing things, i was wondering if is possible to start the proxmox ve through netboot (from the nas) and if is worth the trouble of the setup (my nas is raid5 so is already good), the minipc have 2 slot for 2 2.5 disk at sata3

as now, as i understand i can do something like:

add the 2 mech hdd to the minipc and install on them proxmox ve and then use the nvme for the vm storage, and in case with the ssd is the same thing. so i can buy the ssd later and substitute them gradually to the mech hdd (but it have to be of the same size?) i ask this because the hdd are 1tB each but the ssd that i will buy is surely cheap so 120 128 gB, if that can be a problem i just can partitionate the hdd to idk 100gB so that every disk i'll put will work?

 

[Dunuin]

Thanks for the reply,
I still have some question:
1) the boot device speed impact the speed of a vm located in the nvme?

Speed of your boot/system disk doesn'T really matter.

2) I have 2 mechanical disk spare but not a single ssd, i see from the screenshot that you have 2 ssd 120gb so i searched in this direction and i've found this ssd ( sorry for the site in italian ) what do you think about it?

Looks like it got no DRAM cache so you atleast don't loose your boot disk that easy on an power outage.

3) I will prefer to not buy other hardware as i've already spent a great amount of money for the minipc so i'm carefully considerating performance vs lifetime vs money, ideally i want a system that just work for a great amount of time so i can concentrate on developing things, i was wondering if is possible to start the proxmox ve through netboot (from the nas) and if is worth the trouble of the setup (my nas is raid5 so is already good), the minipc have 2 slot for 2 2.5 disk at sata3

as now, as i understand i can do something like:

add the 2 mech hdd to the minipc and install on them proxmox ve and then use the nvme for the vm storage, and in case with the ssd is the same thing. so i can buy the ssd later and substitute them gradually to the mech hdd (but it have to be of the same size?) i ask this because the hdd are 1tB each but the ssd that i will buy is surely cheap so 120 128 gB, if that can be a problem i just can partitionate the hdd to idk 100gB so that every disk i'll put will work?

PVE only needs about 16-32GB. Whats left you could use to backup your VMs or something like that.

Also...you worry about proxmox killing your SSD but you want to run MySQL on that NVMe? If something is killing SSDs quickly then it is a database VM doing 4K/8K/16K sync writes.

 

[bobmc]

Thanks for the reply,
I still have some question:
1) the boot device speed impact the speed of a vm located in the nvme?
2) I have 2 mechanical disk spare but not a single ssd, i see from the screenshot that you have 2 ssd 120gb so i searched in this direction and i've found this ssd ( sorry for the site in italian ) what do you think about it?
3) I will prefer to not buy other hardware as i've already spent a great amount of money for the minipc so i'm carefully considerating performance vs lifetime vs money, ideally i want a system that just work for a great amount of time so i can concentrate on developing things, i was wondering if is possible to start the proxmox ve through netboot (from the nas) and if is worth the trouble of the setup (my nas is raid5 so is already good), the minipc have 2 slot for 2 2.5 disk at sata3

as now, as i understand i can do something like:

add the 2 mech hdd to the minipc and install on them proxmox ve and then use the nvme for the vm storage, and in case with the ssd is the same thing. so i can buy the ssd later and substitute them gradually to the mech hdd (but it have to be of the same size?) i ask this because the hdd are 1tB each but the ssd that i will buy is surely cheap so 120 128 gB, if that can be a problem i just can partitionate the hdd to idk 100gB so that every disk i'll put will work?

1) the boot device doesn't have a great impact on overall system performance so just run the mechanical drives if you prefer to keep costs low
2) I wouldn't buy that particular SSD but most decent brands have now stopped selling 120Gb (Crucial/Western Digital etc)
3) just use the mechanical hdd to save costs - in theory you could swap to SSD later but you would either have to partition the hard drives down to 120Gb or 240Gb or you would have to buy an SSD of the same size (or larger) as the mechanical hdd you were going to replace

 

[Bomdia]

Speed of your boot/system disk doesn'T really matter.

Looks like it got no DRAM cache so you atleast don't loose your boot disk that easy on an power outage.

PVE only needs about 16-32GB. Whats left you could use to backup your VMs or something like that.

Also...you worry about proxmox killing your SSD but you want to run MySQL on that NVMe? If something is killing SSDs quickly then it is a database VM doing 4K/8K/16K sync writes.

I don't worry much about the mysql db because i use it for my project manager (redmine) and for now i'm the only using it, so the use is very very light.

I was preoccupied for the log as i readed in multiple place that every time you log into proxmox it log a tons of access logs for the graphs etc,
and that wear out the nvme in about 1 year

i've no problem for power outage as i put the minipc, the nas and the router behind an ups.

1) the boot device doesn't have a great impact on overall system performance so just run the mechanical drives if you prefer to keep costs low
2) I wouldn't buy that particular SSD but most decent brands have now stopped selling 120Gb (Crucial/Western Digital etc)
3) just use the mechanical hdd to save costs - in theory you could swap to SSD later but you would either have to partition the hard drives down to 120Gb or 240Gb or you would have to buy an SSD of the same size (or larger) as the mechanical hdd you were going to replace

so if the speed for the boot doesn't matter i can safely use the mech hdd that i already have, I will return here to post the result of the installation.

Thanks very much for the answers, i've a much clearer vision of what to do now