Proxmox Hard Drive Deployment Query

Hardware Hub Storage
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After much research over the past couple of years I am currently awaiting the delivery of a QNAP TS-1655, particularly relevant after the failure of the aging Thecus N7700 Pro that had been functioning without any issues for well over a decade. All of the data from the RAID-6 array was recovered eventually using the commandline under Debian.

The QNAP TS-1655 will also have installed 128Gb RAM as well as a 10GbE adapter, along with a temporary video adapter for initial setup. The intention will be to use the device mainly as a NAS server and to run and store VMs.

Following some further research I’m proposing to install the following drives:

2x Samsung 480Gb SATA SSD - MZ7L3480HCHQ (Enterprise)
- for mirrored Proxmox Host installation

2x Micron 1.92Tb M.2 NVMe - MTFDKBG1T9TDZ (Enterprise)
- to store and run VMs

2x Samsung 1.92Tb -SATA SSD - MZ7L31T9HBLT (Enterprise)

12x Ultrastar DC HC520 (Enterprise)
- for data storage

Note: 10 Ultrastar DC HC520s that have been sitting on a shelf for the past 18 months - 2 years awaiting installation!

If I have understood from my research correctly, it is best to install Proxmox separately from the VMs on a SATA SSD mirrored pair as once the OS has been loaded into RAM there will very little disk access operations. Is that correct? If so, are the proposed Samsung 480Gb SATA SSDs sufficient given the proposed use case?

The issue with the above proposal is that there is only one supplier I’ve found in the UK that has stock of the Micron 1.92Tb M.2 SSD and the supplier will only sell one unit per company! I have considered 2x 2Tb Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD (MZ-V8P2T0BW), but those are not enterprise drives. For any server implementation enterprise level components as component reliability and longevity is the preference over outright performance.

In addition, I am not sure how best to deploy the proposed 2x Samsung 1.92Tb -SATA SSDs. Should they be deployed as read and write caches or would some alternative be preferable?

I’d welcome any thoughts anyone might have about the proposed disk implementation for the QNAP TS-1655 in terms whether or not my proposal is flawed and I’d be interested learn how others might alternatively choose to setup such a 12x HDD, 4x SATA SSD and 2x M.2 NVMe device.

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Honestly a bit overkill on the OS drives. Just some white label 128GB drives would be plenty. Proxmox is not hard on the OS drive.

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@ucav117:
Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
There are no drives under 240Gb on the compatibility list for the QNAP TS-1655 and in the UK the cost difference between a 240Gb SATA SSD and a 480Gb SATA SSD is negligible and makes it a no-brainer to opt for the 480Gb option.
Would it be correct to deploy the other two SATA SSD bays with drives as read and write caches?

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I am not a storage expert so hopefully others chime in but I would benchmark your drives in the system to make sure that a cache drive is necessary for your workload before you dedicate space to it.

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Thanks for the advice. That is what I am unsure of.

I realise that the system will also be used to host VMs for web developmnt purposes so database performance may need to be considered as well.

Having read through the Proxmox Benchmarking Stroage page (-that appears to be unfinished - providing just two read benchmarking test examples) and as I haven’t done any benchmarking before, is anyone able to recommend what benchmarking tests would be appropriate to benchmark the system to get meaningful results?

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