Which ssd do I use

[Crash1hd]

Hey everyone,

First I would like to say Thank-you everyone/anyone for any advice. I come from esxi land and have always had it running on a 32gb usb and in my readings about proxmox that it’s not wise to use USB device due to high read/writes wear and tear. I had to use my second 2tb ssd nvme in my partners MacBook cause the 1tb I got here was causing crashes and the 2tb in mine worked great so I had to give it up and left with 1tb but I also then purchased a new 2tb after learning about tbw and its importance.

So the 2 drives I have to work with is

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0971D2WWL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

and

Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB)
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07LGF54XR/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_DJNSHT8M5KKC3MS0W407

Both good drives but because of there different sizes I can’t do a raid setup so I’m asking what the best configuration advice would be?

So do I put proxmox on the 1tb or the 2tb (knowing the 2tb will do more read/writes) but also knowing that the separation of proxmox and the VM’s also being beneficial (I think)…

Of course I am new to all of this, plan was to create a bare metal hyper visor with multiple hdmis to connect each vm to a different monitor.

Thoughts?
Again Thankyou

 

[leesteken]

Put Proxmox on the 1TB with ZFS and duplicate the partition table (using sgdisk) of the 1TB to the 2TB one and make it into a mirror (RAID1) and secondary ESP. Use the remaining space for less important storage such as templates, ISOs, swap memory, /tmp and /var/tmp for example.

EDIT: I have less SSD wear by applying most of this.

 

[_gabriel]

@leesteken @Dunuin : have you got stats with hosts with zfs with consumer ssd ? wear level, uptime, written bytes ?
i have discarded zfs if not datacenter with power protection ssd.
moreover with last hosts, i prefer deploy lvm thin + proxmox backup server beside pve + datastore on second disk with scheduled snapshot backup.

 

[Dunuin]

I first used 4x 480GB SATA consumer SSDs (Patriot Burst) + 2x 500 GB M.2 consumer SSDs (Samsung 970 EVO) but removed them because my homeserver was writing around 900GB per day while mostly idleing. The 500GB EVO only got a TBW of 300TB so I would have exeeded the TBW (and lost the 5 year warrantee with that even if the drives wouldn't be a year old then) in under a year. So I removed all of the 6 SSDs, put them into my GamingPC and got 6x second hand 200GB enterprise SSDs for the server that each got nearly the full 3600TB TBW left (so basically 9000 TB TBW instead of 300 TB TBW for the same 500GB capacity). The second hand enterprise SSDs were the same price per TB as the new consumer SSDs but got 30 times the durability + powerloss protection against data loss + better performance on continuous writes (no big performance drop when the RAM-/SLC-cache gets full). Now I'm still writing around 600GB per day (moved my heavy to DB sync writing zabbix/graylog LXCs from ZFS to LVM-Thin for less overhead because I don't care that much about loosing some logs/metrics) but don't need to care much about that as the SSDs should be durable enough to handle that for several years. Meanwhile I got 16 of these second hand enterprise SSDs and only one suddenly failed (controller died?) with still something like 98% of life left.

So basically a case of "buy cheap and you buy twice"...wouldn't buy a consumer SSD again for server workloads..especially when using ZFS.

 

[Crash1hd]

Thank you all for the advice, I forgot to mention not sure of it would make any difference on the advice but I also have an older 500gb Samsung 860 evo ssd currently has some of my vms from exsi on it. Seeing as it only has a300tbw I think I will use it for backups only

 

[Crash1hd]

Put Proxmox on the 1TB with ZFS and duplicate the partition table (using sgdisk) of the 1TB to the 2TB one and make it into a mirror (RAID1) and secondary ESP. Use the remaining space for less important storage such as templates, ISOs, swap memory, /tmp and /var/tmp for example.

EDIT: I have less SSD wear by applying most of this.

So even though the 2tb has a better tbw you would still recommend putting it on the 1tb and I didn’t know you could create raid partitions on different size drives?