How to Reduce SSD Wearout in Proxmox?

verishare said:
How do I check if Proxmox can even see the HDD?
Click to expand...
node > Disks or lsblk -o+FSTYPE,LABEL,MODEL.

verishare said:
How do I format it (and which filesystem should I use for a single HDD like this)?
Click to expand...
node > Disks > .... What to use depends a bit on the use case and model number of the disk. Please share yours.
I like ZFS but it tends to perform badly with VMs on HDDs. without disabling sync or having a separate SLOG. CTs are fine.
LVM-Thin would by my secondary choice but you can't directly store files there like you can with ZFS. I don't recommend Directory for storing guests.

verishare said:
How do I add it as a storage target in Proxmox so I can actually assign VMs or backups to it?
Click to expand...
Above way does that automatically if selected. You should edit the Thin provision option for ZFS though. You can create/edit via Datacenter > Storage.
verishare said:
Any mount options I should use to keep things running smoothly?
Click to expand...
This is too vague and depends a lot on storage, guest type, etc. Something I recommend most often is discard. Not as mount option though.
I'd suggest relatime instead of noatime which, AFAIK, is also the default for ext4 nowadays.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Johannes S, verishare and Onslow
Just wanted to come back and say a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this thread. All the advice and suggestions have been incredibly helpful.

I have made quite a few changes to my setup since my first post and wanted to share where things stand now.

What I have done:
- Added noatime to the SSD mount options in /etc/fstab
- Added a 1TB WD Blue HDD as secondary storage, formatted with ext4 and mounted at /mnt/hdd with noatime to minimize unnecessary writes
- Moved VM backups, ISO images, and RRD metrics database to the HDD
- Installed and configured log2ram so logs are written to RAM first and only synced to disk periodically instead of constant small writes
- Decided against ZFS on this system given the limited hardware, ext4 on a single HDD is more appropriate here

Current storage layout (screenshots attached):

SSD wearout is currently at 13% and SMART shows PASSED on both drives. Hoping these changes will slow down the wear significantly going forward.

Thanks again to everyone, for the detailed advice. This thread has been a great learning experience for someone still finding their feet with Proxmox.

Proxmox_disks_current.PNGProxmox_storage_current.PNG
 
verishare said:
- Added noatime to the SSD mount options in /etc/fstab
Click to expand...
Watch out when doing PBS backups with that setting. If I remember correctly, PBS makes use of that.

To get back to your initial question "How to reduce wear out" the correct answer IMHO would be:
Don't worry!

Others here recommended PLP drives, but in reality most workloads are perfectly fine with just good consumer drives.
I have been running a mixture of cheap Kingston DC1000 and WD Red NAS NVME drives and the estimated wearout with 10VMs would be +20 years.

Modern consumer SSDs have a very high TBW. Even though you might suffer internal or ZFS based write amplification, unless you are not running a high workload DB, this is not a problem.

But your Kingston SSD is bottom tier trash when it comes to consumer SSDs, with a laughable TBW amount, so your high wearout is to be expected.
That does not automatically mean that you have to steer into the other extreme and get a PLP server drive :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Johannes S
IsThisThingOn said:
Watch out when doing PBS backups with that setting. If I remember correctly, PBS makes use of that.
Click to expand...

Yes PBS makes use of that, but I think it is setting the last access time by hand and so that „should“ work, but to be save don’t set this to the pbs datastore fs.
 
Latest update on my SSD wear level.

It's only gone up by 1% since my last post. Overall, from October 14, 2025 until today (July 29, 2026), the wear has increased from 8% to 14%.

Things seem to be improving now since I'm no longer running heavy VM workloads for the time being.

Unfortunately, I still can't afford to upgrade to an enterprise SSD, especially with SSD prices rising so much in my country while my salary is still quite low. Looks like it's time for me to start saving and build up a budget for a proper enterprise SSD.

By the way, if anyone is interested in getting a short domain names, I'm willing to let these go at a reasonable price:

kdc: https://www.spaceship.com/s/buy/kdc.my/wDTW0VUISrhxkygb
vbr.my: https://www.spaceship.com/s/buy/vbr.my/xLEorBYX50Jsl7DX

Lastly, thank you to everyone who helped me set up Proxmox for my homelab. I really appreciate all the advice and help.
 
It's not sorted by DISK WRITE and I don't know how long this was running and if you booted via delayacct as per my linked article so this makes judging this very hard. Windows guests do tend to do a lot of IO though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back