How do i run RAID 5 on Proxmox?

[BryanVeluwe]

I've been researching for a bit about raid 5 on Proxmox and setting a usb-stick as boot drive. I've been seeing alot of warnings about using a usb-stick as boot drive, so im still skeptical about doing that part. However i can't find information about raid 5, i'm looking for a way to configure the setup to have: 2 storage disks, 1 failover disk, and 1 hotspare disk. Any advice would be greatyly appreciated!

 

[leesteken]

Putting the ESP partition on one (or more) USB stick(s) is probably fine. Don't put the Proxmox installation (with all the logging) from a USB stick.
Any RAID5 setup depends on your RAID controller, unless you mean to use ZFS with raidz1 (with a hot spare). Either way, such a setup has poor IOPS and is not suitable for VMs.

 

[BryanVeluwe]

So is there anyway to get all the 4 disks to use raid 5 setup? Im pretty new to Proxmox so i don't understand everything

 

[LnxBil]

So is there anyway to get all the 4 disks to use raid 5 setup? Im pretty new to this so i don't understand everything

It's a RAID problem, not a PVE problem. Just boot into your RAID Bios and configure your raid as you would with any other operating system.

 

[BryanVeluwe]

It's a RAID problem, not a PVE problem. Just boot into your RAID Bios and configure your raid as you would with any other operating system.

Is there any disadvantage of using the hardware RAID instead of the software RAID?

 

[leesteken]

Is there any disadvantage of using the hardware RAID instead of the software RAID?

What hardware RAID controller (with or without battery) compared to which software RAID?

 

[BryanVeluwe]

What hardware RAID controller (with or without battery) compared to which software RAID?

I have the ''SW RAID, PERC S140 along with H330 and H730P'' according to Dell. I was looking to use anything close to RAID 5 in Proxmox so i was curious what the big downsides and upsides are between the 2.

 

[cb13]

In case you have H730p, you can configure RAID via iDrac. Here is the guide: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...aid-with-device-settings-lifecycle-controller

 

[Dunuin]

Google should give you lots of answers for HW vs SW raid as this isn't PVE specific.
There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages and you will have compare them and see what fits your usecase best.
Benefit of ZFS for SW raid for example would be that you are not screwed once your hardware fails or if you want to upgrade your server, as ZFS will work on any machine and with HW raid you are forced to replace the hardware with one that uses the same (or at least a compatible) HW raid controller. Otherwise you won't be able to access your data.
And with HW raid you would miss all the nice ZFS features like bit rot protection, block level compression, replication, deduplication and so on.
On the other hand, HW raid is less demanding and especially with BBU+cache often faster and it is easier to replace a failed disk.