Basic VPS disk speed

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.

Testing Storage Speed

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.

SDD Wearout numbers

I didn’t understand why the default Proxmox install sets up the storage the way it does - with the available disk split up into an LVM and an LVM thin storage - so I’ve been reading this excellent Proxmox Storage Guide by Programster (spoiler - the LVM thin makes VM snapshots easier).

At one point in the post they mention that you can see the “Wearout” percentage for any SSD drives in the Proxmox GUI, so of course, since I now own five second hand HP Elitedesk 800 G1/G2’s all with SSD drives, I dived in to have a look at each drive and found this.