What storage to use in my homelab setup?

[helpfinder]

Hi folks,
I would be interested into your opinion.

I am running single node of Proxmox on my UMAX N10 Pro mini PC. It is all-in-one PC with just 256GB SSD. As external storage I am using Synology DS120j I have for years
I am wondering what would be your suggestions for storage if I want improve the current one.

To buy NAS, like Synology e.g. with 4 bays seems for me as waste of money, when looking only on empty Synology NAS.
I am not sure what are my other options - if there is anything where I could put 3-4 disks and use it as storage connected to miniPC I have, or I will end up with build my own customer home server with standard motherboard where I will have controlled with ability to connect several HDDs

Many thanks

 

[louie1961]

What's your budget? You aren't going to run a large number of workloads on a N100 machine with only 8 gb of ram. I am not saying that to be critical, but rather to point out that your DS120J might be fine for the job. I run 3 Proxmox nodes here, and on all three, my strategy is to push as much data to an NFS share on one of my two NAS devices. As a result, I don't use very much of the NVMe drives on any of my nodes. I have NFS shares mounted in my VMs to store application data. I use NFS shares for persistent volumes in docker. And I back up my VMs and CTs to an NFS share. On my N100 based Proxmox node, I have run three VMs and I have a single NVMe drive set up to be the boot partition as well as to store my VMs. It only uses about 100gb of space total.

I think in your situation you may be more limited by the amount of CPU and RAM than by the amount of storage. I don't think trying to connect drives by USB would be very productive. Unfortunately you might need to build a new server, but you don't need to go crazy. My main Proxmox machine is an HP Elitedesk Mini G9 with an intel i5-12500T, two 1 TB NVMe drives in a mirror, and a 10 gbe flexIO NIC. It is plenty fast enough for me, and I use the same NFS set up for that machine as well. NFS seems fine for my purposes especially on a faster network connection

 

[helpfinder]

What's your budget? You aren't going to run a large number of workloads on a N100 machine with only 8 gb of ram. I am not saying that to be critical, but rather to point out that your DS120J might be fine for the job. I run 3 Proxmox nodes here, and on all three, my strategy is to push as much data to an NFS share on one of my two NAS devices. As a result, I don't use very much of the NVMe drives on any of my nodes. I have NFS shares mounted in my VMs to store application data. I use NFS shares for persistent volumes in docker. And I back up my VMs and CTs to an NFS share. On my N100 based Proxmox node, I have run three VMs and I have a single NVMe drive set up to be the boot partition as well as to store my VMs. It only uses about 100gb of space total.

I think in your situation you may be more limited by the amount of CPU and RAM than by the amount of storage. I don't think trying to connect drives by USB would be very productive. Unfortunately you might need to build a new server, but you don't need to go crazy. My main Proxmox machine is an HP Elitedesk Mini G9 with an intel i5-12500T, two 1 TB NVMe drives in a mirror, and a 10 gbe flexIO NIC. It is plenty fast enough for me, and I use the same NFS set up for that machine as well. NFS seems fine for my purposes especially on a faster network connection

Hi louie,
thanks for your reply.
To be said at the beginning - I replaced 8GB build-in RAM with 32GB module (16GB officially supported, but 32GB works without any issues)
I am not running much on this node - currently I have there 3 VMs
* Ubuntu VM where is docker and approx 20 containers running (various applications)
* HomeAssistant appliance
* Proxmox Backup Server

Currently I have Synology 120j with 2TB of HDD - and this is the place where all of my data are. E.g. photos, documents, HomeAssistant backups.
Synology disk has currently 35% of free space

I want to store Proxmox backups to storage for example, which will take some more space on Syno
Of course I can live with this setup some time. Also I can replace 2TB disk to 4TB or 8TB (if supported by DS120j) and have more space. That is fine.

I am just interesting how possibly to achieve more data capacity and also some redundancy (RAID setup) - e.g. to buy 4-bay Synology witout disks for more than 400€ seems for me quite waste of money if there is another option without need to pay for brand, DS software etc., so I started this thread to find our other options I have - if any

 

[louie1961]

I guess it all depends on what you mean by more redundancy. One thing to consider is that RAID is not a backup, so having a raid array isn't going to safeguard your data in the same way as a good back up strategy would. RAID is more for preventing down time in the case of a disk failure. I am not sure buying a 4 bay NAS will actually get you any additional uptime since the boot drive in your UMAX N10 is not redundant.

If by redundant you mean having a sound backup strategy, then you could do that a couple of different ways. A second NAS would definitely help. In that case, you could get a larger NAS as your primary data store and back up that NAS to the DS120J (assuming you put a larger drive in your DS120J). You could also use the cloud as a backup destination to have a copy off site. Unless you have a data need for a 4 bay (or larger) NAS, I would stick to a nice 2 bay NAS, which would give you raid 1 mirroring, data scrubs, etc. I have a Synology DS220+ that I love. The only downside to it is it only has 1 gigabit ethernet.

 

[DrSprawl]

I guess it all depends on what you mean by more redundancy. One thing to consider is that RAID is not a backup, so having a raid array isn't going to safeguard your data in the same way as a good back up strategy would. RAID is more for preventing down time in the case of a disk failure. I am not sure buying a 4 bay NAS will actually get you any additional uptime since the boot drive in your UMAX N10 is not redundant.

If by redundant you mean having a sound backup strategy, then you could do that a couple of different ways. A second NAS would definitely help. In that case, you could get a larger NAS as your primary data store and back up that NAS to the DS120J (assuming you put a larger drive in your DS120J). You could also use the cloud as a backup destination to have a copy off site. Unless you have a data need for a 4 bay (or larger) NAS, I would stick to a nice 2 bay NAS, which would give you raid 1 mirroring, data scrubs, etc. I have a Synology DS220+ that I love. The only downside to it is it only has 1 gigabit ethernet.

I'm glad I stumbled across your reply.

Synology DS918+
DSM version: DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 6
INTEL Celeron J3455
4 CPU cores @ 1.5 GHz, 4 GB of memory
I have Portainer/Docker running a few things; Home Assistant, etc.

What approach did you use to load Proxmox VE on your Synology?