Yet another noob install question...

[MikeWithTheBike]

Hi guys,

I'm about to try Proxmox for the first time, and I have some very basic questions...

I think I've pieced together the info from other posts, but a lot of (good) advice seems to rely on NVMe drives, of which I have zero.

What I do have is a cheap used Dell to play around with, and 5 drives - 2 very cheap SSDs and 3 reasonable 4 TB HDD's.

I'm thinking of using one cheap SSD to install Proxmox and store ISO's, a second identical SSD for VM's (one of which will be TrueNAS) and the 3 HDD's for data.

I understand that a cheap drive for VM's is a bad idea long term, and I'll probably replace that shortly. Assuming I can get everything up and running and I like the setup, I'd wipe the VM drive, use it to mirror the Proxmox drive, and get 2 used enterprise SSD's for the VM's (or NVMe drives on a PCIe card?).

Is that reasonable? Will I kill the cheap SSD's mirroring Proxmox the way I would with VM's? Am I totally missing something obvious? Should I get a separate PCIe controller for the HDD's before I do this (since I understand that I can't pass individual drives through to TrueNAS), or can I set it up this way and then move them to a controller later if I keep this setup?

Thank you for answering all these basic questions that are probably obvious to most of you...

 

[UdoB]

2 very cheap SSDs

With this you should avoid to use ZFS. Go for mdraid instead.

But... I am a ZFS fanboy, so my actual recommendation is to get two used "Enterprise Class" SSDs and install PVE on a ZFS mirror. The "why" is here: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/f...y-a-few-disks-should-i-use-zfs-at-all.160037/

Then there are two options:

1) two very small SSDs --> only used for PVE, the operation system

2) buy larger ones (1TB or 2TB) to be used during installation for the OS and also for the storage of the VMs. But not for "bulk"-data.

While the recommendation is still to separate "the OS" from VM-storage from User-Data this may be acceptable. Especially on Mini-PCs with a limited number of SATA connectors. (I do this in my Homelab while in my dayjob I do really avoid this.)