Ideal disk layout?

[prmadmax]

Hi,
I have a Dell PowerEdge R630 I will be soon wiping to put proxmox on. It has a PERC H730p 2GB NV Mini Mono which I intend to put into HBA mode with the cache disabled.

My question is on disks as currently it has 2x 146GB SAS-2 (SFF) 6Gb/s 15K HDD and 6x 600GB SAS-2 (SFF) 6Gb/s 10K HDD. Would I be better installing proxmox to the 2 146GB drives and using the other 6 for raid or would it be best to have all 8 as 600GB and spread proxmox over that entirely?

 

[UdoB]

One fundamental recommendation since forever is to separate "the OS" from "the data". Without buying new hardware I would install PVE only on those two drives, resulting in a ZFS "rpool", and then (later, after installation and initial setup) create a "data pool" as a striped set of mirrors.

If you can buy two small SSDs (one percent of the datapool capacity is probably large enough) I would replace two of those six data drives with them and add them as a mirrored "Special Device". Only four normal disks are left for this data pool.

This data pool would only have 2 * 600GB = 1.2 TB capacity; and only 50% to 80% shall be used --> 600 GB to 1TB net capacity.

Just a possibility..., ymmv!


Another approach, if you want to enlarge capacity: install PVE on those SIX drives, replace the 146 GB ones with SSDs, add them as a mirrored Special Device later on (not possible during setup). Then you get 1.8 TB brutto --> 900 GB...1.5 TB net capacity. Yes, PVE can boot from each one of those six drives in case of a failure of one of them.

Have fun!