How many drives for my setup?

[leviackerman91]

Hi all! I'm planning to use Proxmox on a Minisforum MS-01 to run some VMs. The pc can accomodate 3 SSDs:

• 1 x NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4
• 1 x NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4
• 1 x NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2

I've planned to use the first one (fastest) to store the VMs and the second one as boot.

Is this right? Should i also use the third slot? How?

 

[leesteken]

I've planned to use the first one (fastest) to store the VMs and the second one as boot.

Proxmox (and the boot partition) don't need speed (or much space) but they do need much write endurance.
You seem to think that the PCIe bandwidth is most important but the actual speed of the drives, the type of flash memory, power-loss protection (on the drive!) and endurance matters more.

 

[FrankList80]

i would agree to leesteken. Its not possible with your Board, but i personally sometimes have not much trust in SSD S.M.A.R.T. data and therefore to prefer HDDs for the boot drive. But i might be old fashioned. I would take the x2 slot for the boot drive and think about the 2nd one for a 2nd datastore. (depends on budget, sizing etc.) But in my opinion it ALWAYS makes sense to put something in (if one is failing, or acting strangely ... you can still copy to the reserve drive).

 

[leviackerman91]

i would agree to leesteken. Its not possible with your Board, but i personally sometimes have not much trust in SSD S.M.A.R.T. data and therefore to prefer HDDs for the boot drive. But i might be old fashioned. I would take the x2 slot for the boot drive and think about the 2nd one for a 2nd datastore. (depends on budget, sizing etc.) But in my opinion it ALWAYS makes sense to put something in (if one is failing, or acting strangely ... you can still copy to the reserve drive).

Would not be a problem to add a third drive in the second slot. In this case how should i configure Proxmox? Does this second drive acts like a raid1?

 

[FrankList80]

Hmhh .... Ad Boot-"Raid-1": this is close to a "religious" question imo if boot "Raid-1" makes sense or not (i tend NOT to) ... but yes, could potentially do that (i do not know if thats possible in the installer right now), but later on after the successfull installation on the SSD of your choice as boot-SSD you can add additional local storage, wizard driven.

 

[leviackerman91]

Hmhh .... Ad Boot-"Raid-1": this is close to a "religious" question imo if boot "Raid-1" makes sense or not (i tend NOT to) ... but yes, could potentially do that (i do not know if thats possible in the installer right now), but later on after the successfull installation on the SSD of your choice as boot-SSD you can add additional local storage, wizard driven.

sorry, i meant raid1 because i thought to add the third drive as a parity for the one storing the VMs

 

[FrankList80]

Understood. "It depends" (as always). In SME projects over the last years i have to admit that with Non-Enterprise Hardware, RAID-1, puts a lot of writes on SSD/HDD that would otherwise have "No writes", or less. You have a small setup, which (apologies upfront) does not smell like brutal Workloads on top of it. Í still experience for "Normal" Workloads 3 years median lifespan for SSD/HDD in the SME sector (e.g. a CRM, a Wiki, a small ERP) etc. Therefore i would NOT go for Boot-RAID and on your hardware just for "JBOD" - aka - 2x Data Stores and 1x Boot-Disk. Thats it. But i strongly recommend putting a 2nd NIC if possible in the PVE and invest in a PBS - also with a 2nd NIC. With that imo you can "survive" 3 years.

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[Virtualization Support for SME and NGOs | DLI Solutions ]

 

[louie1961]

Me personally I would put two larger gen 3 drives in slots 1 and 2 and mirror them. I do this in my HP Elite Mini 800 G9, which only has two NVME slots. two 2 TB drives is enough space (in my case) for the boot partition as well as 10 VMs,and I still have almost a TB of space left. I chose to mirror the drives using ZFS, despite the warnings about ZFS wearing out drives. I did disable the corosync, pve-ha-crm, and pve-ha-lrm services, since this machine is not clustered, and doing so reportedly reduces drive wear. So far I have zero drive wear reported in over 12 months of use. But you could always go with LVM if you are worried about drive wear and write amplification. I would use your third NVME drive for non critical storage for things like ISOs and CT templates.

I am also pretty particular aboout not storing data on my Proxmox host if I can avoid it (just my preference, it makes backing up VMs easier as they are smaller). I tend to use NFS shares for my docker volumes on my Synology or my TrueNAS box. In the case of Nextcloud I also use a NFS share for user data directory that sits on a TrueNAS Scale machine since this one is connected with 10gbe networking. All my VM backups also go to NFS shares.