What is my best option

[Porsmitj2]

Hi
I have just bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p with the intention of installing Proxmox and producing a home server.

The ThinkCentre is a mini pc with only space for one internal disk drive. I currently have a 500Gb SSD.
The only option for adding additional drives is via USB3. What is my best option? is it more crucial to have the proxmox software on the internal drive than the external one? Is the USB drive going to be so slow that I would be better off getting a larger internal drive and not using USB at all.

I haven‘t got my head around everything yet as I am at the start of my journey. Appolgies if my question shows my ignorance, but any help would be appreciate.

Thank you

 

[leesteken]

The Proxmox installation does not need speed but writes a lot, so an external HDD works fine (and USB flash memory does not). Your VMs need all the IOPS they can get because you are running multiple machines at the same time on a drive. Enterprise SSDs (with PLP for caching sync writes) will make you the most happy.
There are indeed several threads on very similar questions on this forum.

 

[Dunuin]

And keep in mind that disks connected via USB are often not that reliable and you might run into more troubles. I would always try to buy a machine with at least 2 internal disk slots, so you can mirror them. Disks will die sooner or later and you will lose data (at least the data since your last backup), you will have to spend a lot of work setting everything up again and you probably won't be able to access your services and data for some days until you find some time to fix stuff and wait for the new ordered disk to arrive. SSDs aren't that expensive anymore (a pair of new 240GB enterprise SSDs for 86€) so no point not mirroring them for redundancy.

 

[Porsmitj2]

Thank you for the helpful advice and apologies for not looking carefully on the forum beforehand. I have been googling for days and nothing much came up. Lesson learnt!
None of the YouTube videos on setting up Proxmox mentioned the issues highlighted here. Thanks again!