Help with ZFS Mirror

[esi_y]

Ok yeah so, basically i do no RAID stuff ?

I really do not know what to answer now. Of course you cannot know this, but ... Proxmox take on RAID is ... they support (fully, without caveats) only ZFS out of the box with dubious reasoning why they do not support other RAID options.

If you really need RAID (I also believe most people would be better off to use the second drive for regular backups) and you really want to stay within the PVE domain, you can do e.g. LVM RAID. I do not want to say the obvious (most popular RAID) because:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/mdraid-o_direct.156036/

 

[Yaya48]

I really do not know what to answer now. Of course you cannot know this, but ... Proxmox take on RAID is ... they support (fully, without caveats) only ZFS out of the box with dubious reasoning why they do not support other RAID options.

If you really need RAID (I also believe most people would be better off to use the second drive for regular backups) and you really want to stay within the PVE domain, you can do e.g. LVM RAID. I do not want to say the obvious (most popular RAID) because:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/mdraid-o_direct.156036/

Well no right now, im thinking about sending back my 2 SSD Crucial P3 and Crucial BX500 and take HDD to do PBS would this be a better option?

Or can i merge both of my 4TB with LVM so i get 8TB ?

 

[esi_y]

In other words, if you feel like learning / experimenting more with this, you can even e.g. install PVE on top of Debian:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm

What that allows you to easily do is to select that e.g. MDRAID within the installer.

Then you can benchmark that. If that sounds too finicky to you, then too bad, either no RAID, no PVE (use something else with nice GUI) or no cheap SSDs (literally, you need to start at ~1TB capacity for consumer ones, with DRAM only, and they are still half price of what Proxmox would want you to get, i.e. PLP ones).

 

[esi_y]

Well no right now, im thinking about sending back my 2 SSD Crucial P3 and Crucial BX500 and take HDD to do PBS would this be a better option?

So if someone asked me they want to do ZFS lab with HDDs to try and test everything, I would tell them go for it by all means because HDDs to not have the issue of endurance limit on TBW. What they do have is low IOPS and well, they are HDDs. So performance is going to be somewhere completely different. Does performance matter for you for backups? I do not know. For some people, it does:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/performance-expectations.155778/page-2#post-712182

 

[Yaya48]

So if someone asked me they want to do ZFS lab with HDDs to try and test everything, I would tell them go for it by all means because HDDs to not have the issue of endurance limit on TBW. What they do have is low IOPS and well, they are HDDs. So performance is going to be somewhere completely different. Does performance matter for you for backups? I do not know. For some people, it does:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/performance-expectations.155778/page-2#post-712182

Nah its just for data safety which is why i though about RAID first but yeah you're right, i won't use RAID on PVE and setup a PBS for backuping my DATA

 

[esi_y]

Nah its just for data safety which is why i though about RAID first but yeah you're right, i won't use RAID on PVE and setup a PBS for backuping my DATA

I think you should be alright with that, but I cannot make decisions for others. Some people think I have something against ZFS per se, but it's really about the use case. Backups on ZFS RAID on HDDs where I do not care how long they take? Sure, why not.

 

[Yaya48]

I think you should be alright with that, but I cannot make decisions for others. Some people think I have something against ZFS per se, but it's really about the use case. Backups on ZFS RAID on HDDs where I do not care how long they take? Sure, why not.

Haha, thanks a lot.

 

[gunpie]

I really do not want to hijack this thread from OP on arguments for/against ZFS - I figured, on this forum, I could be doing full-time just that.

I just say this: Crucial P3 500G ... if I got that right from quick search has no DRAM and TBW 110TB.

You know what will happen some time soon with that SSD on PVE on ZFS, right?

Sorry, I was wrong considering all non NVME-devices as "rust", there still may be "rusty" SSDs - i've burned some too. I was upset by the "break the mirror advice". I totally agree with "I could be doing full-time just that."

 

[esi_y]

Sorry, I was wrong considering all non NVME-devices as "rust", there still may be "rusty" SSDs - i've burned some too.

Over time, on a forum like this (we have no idea who reads it / how they interpret colloquialisms), I avoid anything that even could be ambiguous. Rust to me is a language. There's spinning disk and there's solid state storage. It's not just that you did not notice it was all SSDs, but also the OP did not realise you talked about HDDs.

I was upset by the "break the mirror advice".

I tell everyone who does not need high availability to save their money and have proper backups (spend more money there). I often get lectured how RAIDs are not backup, etc. Sure, but what is the point in a homelab to have RAID with finicky performance (as was here) when the same drive could have instead been backup drive.

I totally agree with "I could be doing full-time just that."

I also invite people who "love ZFS" to go help people like here instead:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/z...o-error-on-import-attempt.156075/#post-712516

I do not hate or love filesystems, I want people to be out of preventable trouble.