New Proxmox Server Setup (Im New to this, Sorry)

[Angelicjack]

Hello Everyone,

I am building my first Proxmox Server. I used to work with Synology and Qnap but i decided to build my own server this time instead of a NAS.
I have some decent hardware laying around on wich i can run Media Software pretty decent.

Now is the question on how to setup the server also thinking about expanding in the future.

Here is what i have now:

- 1x 265GB SSD (For the Proxmox and the Containers and VMs)
- 4x 4TB HDD drives (For a media pool for data like Movies or Pictures)
- 12x 2TB HDD drives (Maybe a second storage pool for backups or other Data?)

The question is how do i setup my drives and my pools? Can i setup the Raid setups in Proxmox it self or shall i do it in the BIOS of the machine?
Also what Raid is the best with idea of expanding the 4x 4TB drives to maybe 8x 4TB or even bigger drives? (Yes i need alot of space for the projects i have laying around, i am a video editor and i have around 20 TB of edited data laying around on differend external drives)

I really hope you guys can give me some tips and tricks on how to setup my build. Sorry if the info is a bit weird or not understandable.
Ask me anything if you need more info. Thankyou in advance!

 

[Dunuin]

The question is how do i setup my drives and my pools? Can i setup the Raid setups in Proxmox it self or shall i do it in the BIOS of the machine?

If you care about your data + you got enough RAM + those HDDs are all CMR and not SMR + all disks are attached to an dumb HBA or onboard disk controller and not a raid controller, then I would use ZFS for the raid.
But then I also would buy 2 or 3 enterprise SSD to help your HDDs as mirrored "special" vdevs so working with small files won't suck that much.

And I personally wouldn't run the system disks / VM/LXC storage disks without redunancy. I would get two enterprise SSDs and put them in a mirror as your system+VM/LXC disks.

Also what Raid is the best with idea of expanding the 4x 4TB drives to maybe 8x 4TB or even bigger drives?

Raidz1/raid5 if you only care about capacity. Otherwise raid10.

For the 2TB disks either a striped raidz2/raid60 for capacity or raid10 for performance.