How to decide disk size for new install

[drmacro]

I've been searching around the web and here to get some idea what size disk I should start with on a new installation.

For example, how far is a 500GB drive going take me? Is that enough to get say, a VM for Home Assistant, a VM for an Influx db/Grafana, a VM with Debian/MQTT server going without performance impact on all?

The PC will have 16GB ram.

If there is discussion of this, I'm happy to go read, I just haven't been finding it with my search terms.

 

[sb-jw]

a VM for an Influx db/Grafana

I have a VM with 8 cores, 16 GB RAM and 200 GB disk. I created a RAID10 from 6 SSDs especially for this VM, as it constantly writes at 10 MB/s.

All metrics from Proxmox VE, CEPH storage, port statistics via SNMP from various switches and collectd instances run on the Go-Graphite instance.

For example, how far is a 500GB drive going take me?

As you saw from my example, this one disc would probably completely fail on me and would have to be replaced regularly because it is worn out. We can't really answer your question unless you explain your usage scenarios in more detail. It all depends on how you use it and make the most of it.

A 500 GB disk can take you a long way, in the data center that would be a joke, I can't do anything with it there.

If you keep it within the usual limits, then I would say that it should last you for a long time. However, I would recommend a two-disc mirror. The simple reason for saving your time to get everything back in the event of an outage will far outweigh the cost. I'm now taking the approach that I'd rather pay with money than time, it saves me a lot of work and nerves and I can spend the time much better with my little daughter.

 

[Dunuin]

Totally depends on what you want to store on it. In my opinion plenty of space for MQTT, HassOS and grafana. For good performance get an enterprise grade SSD otherwise writing to DBs won't be that great as consumer SSDs can't cache sync writes.