Separate HDD for Proxmox?

[TheUnfortunateTechie]

Hi All,

I am in a sort of dilemma right now and wish for some advice here.

I currently have this my Proxmox server:
- i3-4150 (Plans to shop for Xeon replacement. Still looking)
- 32 GB RAM
- 6 x 6 TB Toshiba SATA 7.2k RPM HDD - I have no more spare SATA slots on my motherboard. I have a spare PCIe slot and USB slots

My use case will be:
- General VM host for 2x Microsoft VMs (AD, management VM)
- Containers for NAS (SMB shares), NextCloud, Plex or equivalent, Ubiquiti Controller, FreeRadius

I am looking whether should I invest in a PCIe adapter and a 128GB M2 SSD for installing Proxmox or should I just build a RAIDZ2 volume on the 6 HDD and install Promox on them directly? A M2 SSD seems to mean a single point of failure but is it quick to recover the OS (since data is on RAIDZ2). Also, if I so decide not to continue with Proxmox, which option is it easier to migrate out of Proxmox without having to loss data?

P.S. I understand we can't use a USB HDD for boot image right? (not talking about flash drive but full HDD)

Thanks!

Regards,
The UnfortunateTechie

 

[LnxBil]

For best availability, I'd suggest to install PVE on raidz2 on all disks. As you pointed out, you will have a single point of failure without having at least a mirror.
For "recovery" of the data in case of not wanting to use PVE anymore, I'd suggest to just dd the zvols (for the VMs) to a raw image and import it into your target environment. For the containers, it's just a simple rsync of the data.