Proxmox storage config

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killerm1

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Mar 23, 2025
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Hi All,
I am new to proxmox but have used other vm stuff before. mostly xcp-ng were I had it running with the spining rust pasted thhrough to a freenas vm and then all the other vm's were running on the shared storage from freenas. xcp-ng took up the whole boot drive so that was the only way to do it. with proxmox u can use the boot drive as storage for the vm's so much more ideal.
Anyway what i wanted to ask was what would be the optiumal way to set up my new server, I have 4 x 4tb hdd that i wanted to use as zfs storage with freenas and I also have m.2 drives 1 x 2tb and 1x 250gb. my thoughts were to use the 250gb as the boot/vm drive. but not sure what to do with the 2tb. maybe as a cache drive for freenas? I guess my question is what should I use the 2tb drive for? for what I want to run 250gb is more then enough for vm's
 
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To me, ideal would be a pair of mirrored drives, say 128gb or 256gb for the OS. If one dies, your system will not go down. Better if these are not NVMe drives as the speed won't benefit anything. I would prefer to use a pair of mirrored m.2 (presumably NVME?) drives to host the VMs. Putting your VMs on faster storage is a great answer for max performance. ZFS mirrors will give you a level of redundancy that is nice to have for your VMs. Are you virtualizing FreeNAS on Proxmox? Assuming FreeNAS is anything like TrueNAS, you will have best luck if you can pass through an HBA to it and not just drives.

I use a bunch of different strategies across my 4 Proxmox nodes, based on what the hardware will let me do. My main node has mirrored boot drives, Mirrored VM drives, then an ASM1166 M.2 to SATA adapter that I pass through to TrueNAS scale. My previous main node (HP elite mini 800 G9) only had the two NVME drive slots avaialble. So I ran the boot drive and the VM drives in the same set of mirrored drives. I have a N100 NUC box that only has the one NVMe slot, so everything runs on the one drive. My last node is an HP Z640 with an Icy Dock 2.5 inch sata 4 bay adpater in it. So I have two 256 GB SATA SSDs mirrord for the OS, two 2 GB SATA SSDs mirrored for the VMs and a bunch of other spinning disks that I pass through to various VMs.
 
You could passthrough the 4x4TB HDDs and the 2TB SSD to the FreeNAS VM -> Create a RAID10 and use the SSD as either metadata or cache VDEV and use the 250GB SSD as boot drive and to store VMs. However that gives you basically zero redundancy, you might as well use RAID0 for the HDDs and if you are using non-enterprise SSDs, but some cheap consumer SSDs, you might have a close lock on the wear indicator.
However I strongly suggest to invest in two additional SSDs, for example buy a used 250GB enterprise SSD and a 2TB SSD. Then you could use ZFS RAID1 for PVE and the two 2TB SSDs to build a RAID1 Metadata VDEV.
 
I always seem to call truenas freenas for some reason. probably because when I first used it freenas had a free version and that is what I used. Yes I will be passing through the onboard sata with the 4 x 4tb drives to trunas scale. I have a 2nd 2tb nvme that I was going to use elsewere but after reading the replies have decicded to use it here in place of the 250gb.

So I think I will go with 2 x 2tb nvme drives mirrored as the boot / pve and the 4 x 4tb hdd past through to truenas for network storage. I am the only one using the server and it is mostly for me to play around with different services and run a media server. So think having cache drives is probably overkill. I have an 8tb hdd that I will use for backing up the important stuff and the rest will just be movies and stuff so dont really care about backing that up.

How do u think I should set up the 4 x4tb drives? I was thinking raid 4 to have some protection but in saying that I took my last server down after 3 drives failed at once in a raid 6 so lost everything...
 
I would suggest RAID10, if you don't need that much space, but want performance and reliability in return. As alternative you could use RAID-Z1, basically a RAID 5 with ZFS.
In your last post you mentioned "RAID 4", which is a very uncommon RAID level and uses a dedicated parity disk. It's not something which natively supported by FreeNAS/TrueNAS, as far as I know.
As alternative you could take a look into UnRaid, which is also a robust solution for small setups.
 
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