I am running the latest version of Proxmox on my Dell R710. I have a raid hardware controller inside of it. Right now, I am using raid 1 and have 4 Black 1 TB drives. The first two are used for Proxmox OS and VMs, and the second two are used for storage/backups. I need to increase my drive space, so I would like to do at least 4 TB HDs I think with this upgrade. I am looking at the 4 TB Red Pro nas drives. And I am thinking of bumping up to Raid 5. I would use the same layout, with 3 drives for os/vms, and 3 for storage/backups. This is for home use only, and I would be the only user. I would like to "future-proof", and am considering zfs as my new fs. I would appreciate any tips and advice on my new setup.
New (re-)build suggestions
- Thread starter droidus
- Start date
If you want to use ZFS, don't use the HW RAID controller. Either check if you can switch it to HBA/JBOD mode (not sure if the older Dells can do that) or try to get a cheap HBA controller and plug in the disk back plane there.
ZFS does want access to the disks as raw as possible and RAID controllers interfere in one way or another. Some people tend to use a lot of raid 0 for each disk as workaround. Don't do that. Handling a failed disk gets much more complicated, and you still have tha raid controller in between the disk and ZFS.
Regarding pool layout: For the system you can use a simple mirrored pool (using the installer). For the other pool where you will store your guests, go with a pool made up of mirrored disks (raid 10 like). You will get better IOPS which is what you want for multiple guests and avoid the unwelcome surprise of unexpected higher space usage due to parity data on any raidz(1,2,3) pools. The documentation has a section about this with more details.
ZFS does want access to the disks as raw as possible and RAID controllers interfere in one way or another. Some people tend to use a lot of raid 0 for each disk as workaround. Don't do that. Handling a failed disk gets much more complicated, and you still have tha raid controller in between the disk and ZFS.
Regarding pool layout: For the system you can use a simple mirrored pool (using the installer). For the other pool where you will store your guests, go with a pool made up of mirrored disks (raid 10 like). You will get better IOPS which is what you want for multiple guests and avoid the unwelcome surprise of unexpected higher space usage due to parity data on any raidz(1,2,3) pools. The documentation has a section about this with more details.
Good to know, thank you. It is a PERC H700.
I will look into seeing if it supports that mode, or the alternative.