Optimal Drive Configuration

[TrendMend]

Good day,

I've been tinkering with Proxmox for a bit now, and I'm wondering what the best tactic is for drive configurations. I'm using an R710 with an h200 (which I'll be converting into JBOD HBA shortly). Along with this is 30gb of ram and 3 storage devices:

1x Samsung 870 Evo 250GB - SSD
1x Seagate Ironwolf NAS 2TB - HDD
1x WD Blue 2TB - HDD

I was thinking of trying out ZFS (only used lvm) since I wouldn't have hardware RAID anymore, and then setup a ZFS-mirror for the 2 HDDs with the SSD used as a cache. I don't believe the SSD has power loss protection, will that be an issue? And is it okay to put the Proxmox install on the HDDs with the VMs?

I'm trying to prioritize speed (while still keeping some form of redundancy) as this will be used as a main workstation with my GPU passthrough, along with a few VMs/LXCs for my homelab. Thank you very much.

EDIT: Mixed up JBOD and HBA.

 

[Dunuin]

Good day,

I've been tinkering with Proxmox for a bit now, and I'm wondering what the best tactic is for drive configurations. I'm using an R710 with an h200 (which I'll be converting into JBOD shortly). Along with this is 30gb of ram and 3 storage devices:

1x Samsung 870 Evo 250GB - SSD
1x Seagate Ironwolf NAS 2TB - HDD
1x WD Blue 2TB - HDD

I was thinking of trying out ZFS (only used lvm) since I wouldn't have hardware RAID anymore, and then setup a ZFS-mirror for the 2 HDDs with the SSD used as a cache. I don't believe the SSD has power loss protection, will that be an issue? And is it okay to put the Proxmox install on the HDDs with the VMs?

I'm trying to prioritize speed (while still keeping some form of redundancy) as this will be used as a main workstation with my GPU passthrough, along with a few VMs/LXCs for my homelab. Thank you very much.

ZFS will create alot of overhead. Especially noticable if you workload is doing alot of sync writes. In such a case it can shred a consumer SSD like your Evo in months. And your SSD indeed got no powerloss protection, so it will loose all async cached data on an power outage what isn't great for neighter data integrity nor reliability. And without a powerloss protection sync write performance and overhead should be even worse because sync writes can't be cached and without caching the SSD can't optimize writing to the NAND chips.
And keep in mind that ZFS needs direct access to the drives (initiator target) not a raid controller set to JBOD. You really want no abstraction layer in between at all. Some controllers allow you to switch to a HBA mode or the firmware can be flashed from IR to IT mode so the raid controller will become a stupid HBA.
If you don't care about the ZFS features and just want a fast raid I would stick with HW raid (best one with BBU and cache module) and install a LVM-thin ontop of that.