Onboard NVMe controller with ZFS (ZFS is not compatible with disks backed by a hardware RAID controller)

[AxAn]

When I last upgraded my home Proxmox setup I bought a Gigabyte X570 AORUS ULTRA motherboard thinking that I might cross over to using NVMe-discs in the future.
Now I bought 3 Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB NVMe-discs and ripped out the old spinning discs.
After installing Proxmox 7.4, on a small SATA-disc, I tried to create ZFS pool in the GUI but cannot select any of my NVMe discs.
The following error is shown:
ZFS is not compatible with disks backed by a hardware RAID controller

In the BIOS the option "NVMe RAID mode" is set to disabled.

1. Is there any way to get this working with what I currently have?
2. If #1 is not possible, what is the best way to get this working with the NVMe discs?

I can't return any of the hardware.

 

[leesteken]

The Note is always there, even when there are no unused disks to create a ZFS pool. It's unlikely that it is the reason why you cannot select the drives. Have you tried refreshing the browser cache?

 

[AxAn]

The Note is always there, even when there are no unused disks to create a ZFS pool. It's unlikely that it is the reason why you cannot select the drives. Have you tried refreshing the browser cache?

I tried again and no matter what I did in Firefox I could not select the discs, but in Chrome incognito mode I could.
That was a rather easy problem at least.

 

[AndreScalaPT]

Hi, I'm getting this warning also!
But I can select the drives if I want... the question will be, it is safe? Will I get erros? Thanks

Edit- I'm using 3 Samsung SSD 870 QVO

 

[leesteken]

Hi, I'm getting this warning also!
But I can select the drives if I want... the question will be, it is safe? Will I get erros? Thanks

If you're disks are not connected via a hardware RAID controller, you'll be fine. The warning is about using ZFS on top of hardware RAID.

Edit- I'm using 3 Samsung SSD 870 QVO

QLC drives are very problematic with ZFS and you will probably have issues with them. Please search this forum about QLC drives.

 

[aaron]

I'm using 3 Samsung SSD 870 QVO

I hope not for VMs… those drives are terribly slow once their internal write cache is full!

That warning is there permanently, we do not try to detect if the disks are connected via a HW RAID controller or not as that would be hard to do reliably.

 

[AndreScalaPT]

Any SSD/HDD recommendation fot that size/speed? thanks

 

[aaron]

Any SSD/HDD recommendation fot that size/speed? thanks

Ideally, anything with Power-Loss-Protection (PLP), the cheapest ones are just below 300€ by now. With consumer SSDs it is always a bit hit or miss if they are decent enough. Consumer SSDs are optimized for a desktop workload, where they will see writes happening in short bursts and data integrity is "not that important".
Anything with PLP will be server/datacenter grade. They can ACK writes a lot faster because even if the power is lost, the capacitors of the PLP will provide enough power for the SSD to write everything into non-volatile memory, so data-loss should not happen.
They can usually also sustain the specs while consumer SSDs will drop rapidly in performance once the cache is full. And with multiple guests, the disks will see much more constant writes than in a single desktop machine.