Sep. 9, 2023
I couldn’t help but measure some VPS disk speeds while I was busting out the fio.

Binary Lane only claims “pure SSD drives” but seems pretty great. The difference between Digital Ocean SSD and NVME is disappointing. Obviously you’re sharing a drive with other users, so perhaps this depends on what else is going on.
Sep. 3, 2023

Now I’ve added NVME drives to my nodes, plus added an external NMVE RAID, I’ve got quite the collection of storage options. For one of my nodes, it looks like this:

- The 256GB NVME the OS is installed to
- The 512GB SSD, currently running ZFS
- The Synology NAS - 4 x 6TB drives in RAID 5 on a 1GB switch
- A pair of 256GB NVME sticks in an external USB3 enclosure set up as a mirrored ZFS pool.
For my dev VM’s I often set them up to have their storage on the NAS - it’s just super easy to move them around then. The production VM’s currently have their storage on the SSD (that machine hasn’t had the NVME upgrade yet), but obviously with all these options, it’d be interesting to think about what goes where.
Aug. 28, 2023

As part of my strategy to not worry about the slightly dodgy SMART reporting on the SDD’s in my HP Elitedesk G2 800 Mini Proxmox nodes, I’d decided to make use of the full sized M.2 slot to install 256GB NVME drives. That way I can boot from those, and have the SSD’s running ZFS which allows scrubbing to check the integrity of all the data. My VM disks can live on this drive.