Plan to build a NAS and want to use Proxmox advice

[nickshanks]

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I like the idea that I can add more HDDs later on so I'm happy to initially start with 2 (or maybe even 1) drive. Does ZFS need a cache drive?

Also to get this to work optimally, do I install Proxmox on the M.2 OR install to the HDDs and have the M.2 as cache drive or is there a better way of doing this?

 

[nickshanks]

Just bumping this as I was mistakenly banned so the post was removed.

 

[SInisterPisces]

Good luck with the new install!

To clarify, you have (1) M.2 and a single pair of HDDs? Do you have a second m.2 slot?

You'll want to install Proxmox on either a single m.2, or optionally a pair of 500 GB m.2 name in a ZFS mirror for redundancy. You'll also want to install your VM on to either 2x2.5" SATA SSDs or 2xNVME (a pool of at least one mirror vdev). HDD storage can hold VMs, but it'll be very slow (writes at the write speed of the slowest HDD, slow random seek, etc.). SATA SSDs are plenty fast enough for mere mortal home server use, unless you're trying to saturate a 10 GbE NIC (and even then you can still do it with 4 of them in a mirror pool).

The 3.5" HDDs will let you do a ZFS mirror (similar to RAID 1). A cache probably isn't needed; caches in ZFS have very niche use cases. tl;dr ZFS uses free memory for its fastest cache, so you want to max your RAM before you add (slower) storage cache. Maximizing RAM until you can't anymore is the first thing you should do to make ZFS do ZFS things faster.

For best performance and ease of use for a NAS, consider that Proxmox isn't meant to be a storage server. It can be used that way, but you'll have to do things like manage users and permissions and shares on the CLI. Instead, enable PCIe passthrough and pass the SATA drive controller to a VM running NAS software (TrueNAS, etc.). The drives will show up there, and be fully managed by the NAS software without Proxmox being in the way. (TrueNAS will want 8-16 GiB of RAM dedicated to the VM, very preferably 16 GiB according to its documentation.)

Proxmox can be overwhelming to set up and get used to at first, but once you understand how it works, it gets a lot more intuitive and easy to use. I highly recommend this free course to get started: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo