Home Lab Storage Suggestions!!

[dofus]

Hello Everyone,
I need some suggestion for the home lab storage.
I have a Synology DS718+ ( 2x2TB RAID) with Lenovo C30 running Proxmox.

Lenovo C30 Specs
2xE5-2640V2
32GB ECC Ram( ram upgrade planned).
MSata Drive for Proxmox OS
I have a 1TB 7200rpm and WD 320Gb 10k SATA Drive.
Quad port NIC
Nvidia K4000 PCI passthrough to a Gaming VM
HD6450 1GB for Server Video out.

Mobo has four SATA connectors two SATA 6.0Gb/s (red), two SATA 3.0Gb/s (orange)
Three SATA connectors via integrated Storage Controller Unit (SCU) in chipset, SATA 3.0Gb/s, RAID 0, 1, 5 support. To use these SCU SATA ports I need a SASHDD enablement module which is expensive and not available that easily.

I am thinking to have a fast and reliable storage on Proxmox which I can recover in case of failure and I have one Spare PCIe Gen 3 slot free too.
I need storage as this server hosts a Syslog server, Firewall, Load balancer, Proxy, CSGOServer and Home assistant

I have 3 options in mind.( happy to be corrected )

1. Just add 2x 2TB SSD on Red SATA ports and make a ZFS Mirrored Pool and move the 1TB and 320GB SATA drive to Orange ports ( cheapest way in my opining with fast storage)
2. Sell that Synology NAS without HDDs and just add 2x1TB SSD make a ZFS Mirrored Pool for Proxmox and then buy a LSI card and PCI passthrough to a TrueNAS VM and use the 2x 2TB HDD out of Synology for initial use and then scale eventually.( But there is no Space for adding more drives to the case)
3. Same as Point 2 but use Fractal Design define R6 case to store all the drives easily and more ventilation with potentially a bigger power supply ( currently C30 has 800W Gold + PSU)

This is all what I have in my mind, but happy to take a different approach, just want to keep it budget.

 

[Dunuin]

Keep in mind that SSDs will wear fast using ZFS and virtualization. Especially if you are using workloads with alot of small or sync writes. My home server for example is writing around 900GB of data per day to the SSDs and 80 percent of it are logs (elasticsearch) and metrics (zabbix) created by the server itself. Write ampkification is a big problem here (around factor 20 from guest to NAND flash). So option 1 isnt that cheap if you buy two durable SSDs.

And HDDs can be problematic because of the IOPS. My server is writing with 450 IOPS while idling and that is too much for most HDD zfs mirrors.

 

[dofus]

Keep in mind that SSDs will wear fast using ZFS and virtualization. Especially if you are using workloads with alot of small or sync writes. My home server for example is writing around 900GB of data per day to the SSDs and 80 percent of it are logs (elasticsearch) and metrics (zabbix) created by the server itself. Write ampkification is a big problem here (around factor 20 from guest to NAND flash). So option 1 isnt that cheap if you buy two durable SSDs.

And HDDs can be problematic because of the IOPS. My server is writing with 450 IOPS while idling and that is too much for most HDD zfs mirrors.

Thank you.
considering that I am planning to run Syslog and other active writing on a non mission critical disk, Most of my VM are cybersecurity/Network security related which I can take backup of configuration and restore which I can restore in the event of a failure.
Fast storage will be mostly for Windows ,Ubuntu or Test VMs I want to make quickly and then destroy once work is done.

Do you think I should keep the Synology D718+ NAS ?? Also what would be ideal and budget setup in your opinion?

 

[Dunuin]

Thank you.
considering that I am planning to run Syslog and other active writing on a non mission critical disk, Most of my VM are cybersecurity/Network security related which I can take backup of configuration and restore which I can restore in the event of a failure.
Fast storage will be mostly for Windows ,Ubuntu or Test VMs I want to make quickly and then destroy once work is done.

Do you think I should keep the Synology D718+ NAS ?? Also what would be ideal and budget setup in your opinion?

I would keep that Synology NAS and use it for backups. Its always better to store your backups on another machine and even better if that machine isn't in the same room or even at a friends home so you can use it for remote backups.

Cheapest and fastest option is to buy second hand enterprise SSDs. Make sure they got powerloss protection (otherwise write amplification will be bad, because sync writes can't be cached in the SSDs RAM to optimize write operations) and a decent durability (mine got 21125 TBW per 1TB storage because they are MLC...thats 58x the durability you get with an consumer QLC SSD).

If you want to use HDDs you might want to use atleast a Stripped Mirror with 4 HDDs (like raid10) so the drives can handle a little bit more IOPS. And be careful not to use SMR drives. These are super slow at writing and can cause ZFS errors because of the bad response time.

 

[dofus]

I would keep that Synology NAS and use it for backups. Its always better to store your backups on another machine and even better if that machine isn't in the same room or even at a friends home so you can use it for remote backups.

Cheapest and fastest option is to buy second hand enterprise SSDs. Make sure they got powerloss protection (otherwise write amplification will be bad, because sync writes can't be cached in the SSDs RAM to optimize write operations) and a decent durability (mine got 21125 TBW per 1TB storage because they are MLC...thats 58x the durability you get with an consumer QLC SSD).

If you want to use HDDs you might want to use atleast a Stripped Mirror with 4 HDDs (like raid10) so the drives can handle a little bit more IOPS. And be careful not to use SMR drives. These are super slow at writing and can cause ZFS errors because of the bad response time.

which model on SSDs and HDDs would you recommend ? I am little new to Storage domain