What to mirror

S

starstrk

New Member
Jul 2, 2026
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I am building my first proxmox server. I have 3 NVME drives and one spinning HDD.

My thoughts were to use one nvme for PVE, one for VMs & containers, and the HDD for ISO uploads etc.

With the last nvme I was going to mirror either the PVE or the VM nvme - don't know which would be the right choice?

If my whole approach is wrong, I would appreciate knowing that as well.

Thanks in advance,
B
 
Hi @starstrk , welcome to the forum.

Keep in mind that disk Mirror is not a backup. It only protects you from a physical disk failure. Are all NVMe of the same type? Is one older than then others? Do they have different used percentage?
You may benefit from using the 3rd disk as an actual backup destination. Depending on your used capacity and potential reduction ratios, you may be able to fit more than the current state that mirror allows.

Cheers

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
bbgeek17 said:
Hi @starstrk , welcome to the forum.

Keep in mind that disk Mirror is not a backup. It only protects you from a physical disk failure. Are all NVMe of the same type? Is one older than then others? Do they have different used percentage?
You may benefit from using the 3rd disk as an actual backup destination. Depending on your used capacity and potential reduction ratios, you may be able to fit more than the current state that mirror allows.

Cheers

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
Click to expand...
Thank you for your reply.

I have 4 physical nvme drives. 2x 500gb and 2x 1tb. I was going to use a 500gb for PVE and a 1 TB for VMs. Honestly, I don't know how many VMs/containers that a 1TB will hold.

The 1 TB drives I have been used before. The 500gb nvme drives are new.

Since I don't plan to HA cluster, I was planning to disable all the HA logging to attempt to reduce wear on my PVE NVMe drive.

I understand that RAID is redundancy/uptime and not a backup. I have a NAS that I plan to usei with PBS to backup my server, and VMs.

I have no experience with running, much less rebuilding, a proxmox server. I don't know if it is a bigger pain to restore the PVE from backup and get it back up and running, or to do that for the VM nvme.

I wanted to have 2 mirrored pair of nvme drives. However, the motherboard/bios in the computer I have doesn't support more than 3 nvme drives.

Hence my quandary. Which drive should I mirror? Or should I not mirror at all?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, comments, or recommendations.
 
starstrk said:
Hence my quandary. Which drive should I mirror? Or should I not mirror at all?
Click to expand...
This is a home setup; you are not running critical infrastructure. You already have a backup plan in place.

If you want to experiment with a mirrored configuration, use a flexible option such as ZFS and configure it on your boot drives. If, a few months later, you find yourself needing additional space, you can always break the mirror. Or perhaps you will become comfortable reinstalling and rebuilding the OS portion of PVE and decide at that point that protecting the data is more important than protecting the OS.

There is no single “best” answer here. Experiment with different approaches and, over time, you will settle on the configuration that works best for your needs.

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
I think mirroring with ZFS would offer a great benefit for both PVE OS data and VMs. Since PVE doesn't need much space, why not set up the 1TB NVMe drives as a ZFS boot mirror? The remaining space will automatically be configured for use by VMs.

However, be aware that ZFS is going to create write amplification of approximately 2.5x, so if your SSDs are going to be killed by the writes, you may want to consider a different file system or pick up some used enterprise SSDs.
 
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