SSD or HHD for Proxmox Server
- Thread starter Selter
- Start date
Definitely SSDs, they have more performance and less power consumption. This can definitely make a difference in a system that operates 24/7.
But the question always remains as to what exactly the system should do. The equipment usually depends on this.
But the question always remains as to what exactly the system should do. The equipment usually depends on this.
Good question. It's been shown (by an IBM researcher... need to re-lookup the reference) that bitrot can seriously affect SSD's, even (especially) when sectors are never overwritten. On Windoze I now have a habit (and recommend) of running the free DiskFresh app about 2-3 times a year on all SSD's. It's a quiet embarrassment that not a single industry vendor talks about addressing this. Seems it would not be hard to build it into the SSD firmware.
BTW, it's actually worse on enterprise SSD's than consumer.
BTW, it's actually worse on enterprise SSD's than consumer.
Toshiba NAS drive for spinning, or nvme. Personally I sprang for a Lexar, but go for "pro" level instead of "evo", knowwhutImean? Get a high-rated TBW drive, and stay well away from QVO and especially SMR drives - you want CMR.
And put everything on UPS power.
Edit: for ZFS you want a SAS HBA in IT mode (actively cooled), try to keep as much as possible off the motherboard SATA ports.
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the cern use
RAM - ssd - hdd - tape
and have a software copying all stuff back as fast as possible, it cool to see the tape room
RAM - ssd - hdd - tape
and have a software copying all stuff back as fast as possible, it cool to see the tape room
Why do people insist on running enterprise software on such limited consumer systems? But it runs fine, most of the time.
Installing Proxmox on HDD is fine. It does not need to be fast but it does write a lot of logs and graphs (which is not good for cheap SSDs). Use a (enterprise) NVMe with PLP for the best performance for VMs. This had been answered many times over on the forum, so please search a bit.
Indeed. @Selter, you would probably be better off with something like a "firewall appliance" mini-pc that is low wattage.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CJLK9GZV
^ This is what I ended up getting for Proxmox homelab - 4x10Gbit SFP+, 5x2.5Gbit, under $400. I threw an ~$13 dual fan on top to keep it cool and have a 4-bay 3.5-in hotswap disk cage hanging off the mini-SAS port. They were sold out for several weeks; now back in stock
Difficulty: VGA-only output. Not a problem for me, I have a couple of old non-HDMI monitors. (And don't try booting with reFind, it hangs. Grub is ok)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09QMC1458
^ Fan
Be aware that Proxmox 6.x kernel has a bug with the 10Gbit ports if you go with this, stick with PMVE 7.x until it's fixed. Or what I did is upgrade 7-to-8 in place and still boot the old 5.x kernel (don't do this for Prod!)
ServeTheHome has a lot of reviews on youtube as far as decent-to-good "firewall appliances" / mini-PCs that should be able to run PMVE 24x7 without slamming your electric bill.
Buy a large enough M.2 drive and do everything on the one drive. No need to separate them out in my opinion. I have an N100 based NUC device running Proxmox and a couple of Debian VMs running RSYNC as a back up destination for my NAS machines. I connect larger hard drives by USB, since I don't need RAID nor speed. This box just serves to keep extra copies of my data. In your case, I would store the OS and the VMs on the M.2 and then keep all your important data on a different device (NAS perhaps with either an NFS share or CIFS share).
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Because not everyone has an enterprise budget, nor the need for enterprise reliability. For many this is just a hobby. BTW, Proxmox runs GREAT on all of my consumer systems. If something dies, I'll just buy another. The worst thing that can happen for me is that someone can't read my blog for a couple of days. No big deal, since it doesn't generate any revenue for me.
Might be beneficial in case you are using lots of IO as onboard SATA/USB/Wifi/LAN/M.2 + some PCIe slots usually share the same few PCIe lanes that link CPU and chipset. Have a lot of IO going on and this weak PCIe link will be the bottleneck. My server for example also got 10 onboards SATA ports but the PCI bandwidth is so limited that it wouldn't be able to run all at full speed at the same time.
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