SAS vs SATA question for virtualization in home-server

9bitbyte

New Member
Sep 25, 2021
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Hi all,

I recently acquired an HP Z240 Workstation with Xeon E3-1270 v6 (4Cx3,80GHz+HT), 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SATA SSD and NVS 315. I want to use it as an all-in-one, always-on, home server for backups, NAS, Plex, NextCloud, Bitwarden, etc. I will host Ubuntu VMs and Docker containers, on top of Proxmox (running Proxmox from the 512GB SSD).

I consider purchasing 2 SATA HDDs x 4TB (7K RPM), which I will set-up as a ZFS pool with RAID 1 (mirror). Or would 4 hdds x 2 TBs perform better?

As this is a SATA-based mother-board and considering my use-case, I am not sure if it’s worth investing in a (used) SAS HBA controller and disks?

I have been reading up people mentioning SAS is an absolute minimum for virtualization. Do you think that makes sense for my use-case?

From what I reckon based on actual performance tests, for similarly spec’d drives (e.g. in the 7K RPM range), SAS disks only very marginally outperform SATA drives. It seems you only get meaningful performance improvements from SAS drives with really higher RPMS (e.g. in the 15K range), which is to be expected…

I very much appreciate your ideas and guidance, in advance!
 

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