RAID Recommendation

[sennister]

I picked up a used Dell 7820 with Dual Xeon Gold 6140s and 384GB of RAM. I am running Proxmox as a home lab machine.

I just put in a PCIe card with 4x WD Black 2TB NVME drives and have it set with Bifurcation. Everything is looking good and all drives are visible. The boot for Proxmox is on a separate NVME and I have a few other drives in it as well.

My plan was to initially set up the drives on the PCIe card as ZFS storage using RAIDZ but I have been reading this might not be the best use of these drives as it is hard on commercial SSDs.

RAM clearly isn't going to be an issue with this machine but am I still better off with RAID10? VMs will reside on this pool.

Thanks

 

[mariol]

Hello @sennister and welcome to the Proxmox Community

It depends on what you expect. Basically, we always recommend enterprise hardware [0]. And Raid10 with ZFS definitely has the better performance. As a data grave or where not much performance is needed, RaidZ is certainly ok [1].


[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_system_requirements
[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#sysadmin_zfs_raid_performance

 

[sennister]

As far as what I am expecting..

Really none of these VMs are really going to have a ton of read writes. The only two machines that are going to be important are a desktop that I use for mainly surfing the internet and a Pihole VM. Even the PiHole VM isn't all that important because I have two, one in Proxmox and one as a VM in one of my Synologys. I really only have two in order to keep one up at all times in case I have to take one down. If I was overly concerned I do have other drives in this system. Proxmox boots from a separate 256G NVME, there is another 500GB NVME, a 1TB SSD and 2TB HDD. I was kind of planning on using the 2TB as a backup volume and use the 500 and 1TB if I have VMs that need better performance.

I guess my main "concern" is I really don't want to burn out these SSDs in a year. I have never messed with RAIDZ before and was just planning on that route but then was a little shocked to see several posts from various people saying ehhh it isn't a good idea to run VMs on it. If not used that way, how do people use RAIDZ? What posts I read mainly were concerned over RAM requirements, I have plenty. The other point mentioned was not great IOPS. Sure, I get that striping is going to probably have better performance.

 

[mariol]

Of course, you can do that if you have other hardware available anyway. You could also say that RaidZ is for default things, and then I'll make another mirror (if I need it) for VMs that should need more power or should have separate I/O.

If you want to use the single disk with PBS, don't use COW (copy on write) as the file system, but an EXT, which performs better, and you can also write it very full.

I just put in a PCIe card with 4x WD Black 2TB NVME drives

I guess my main "concern" is I really don't want to burn out these SSDs in a year.

What exactly are they? Do you have a link to a detailed page from the manufacturer?