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.

ZFS Basics on Proxmox

I’m a keen listener of the 2.5 Admins podcast in which there’s frequent enumeration of the advantages of ZFS as a file system. So much so, that I’ve had occasional twinges or regret about the money I spent on the Synology - although it has been boringly reliable and does everything I need.

Proxmox has some built in support for ZFS, including through the web GUI. So I’ve been itching to give it a try.