Recommended drives for basic proxmox setup

[natedawg]

Hi all,

Going to be running a mini router (Intel 8505) and another mini PC (Intel N95) to run some basic services like Home Assistant, Plex, Opnsense, Wireguard, etc...

I have been looking into getting some drives for storage and wondering what I should get.

I am not going to be running raid or ZFS, so that being said.

The main question is, should I be looking for cheap enterprise SSDs, or should I just get some good m.2 nvme drives? Do the enterprise SSDs have better low queue depth performance than consumer m.2 nvme drives? I am not super concerned with raw sequential throughput, but more with I/O for the VMs.

Some of my questions:

1. I recently picked up a 4TB S4610 on sale, but performance doesn't seem to be much better than something like an 870 Evo, besides the DWPD.
2. Is there any benefit to PLP without ZFS?
3. The basic m.2 sata drive that came with my N95 mini PC benchmarks way better 4KQ1T1 than the S4610. Am I doing something wrong here?

Command for example:

fio --loops=$LOOPS --size=512 --filename="$TARGET/.fiomark.tmp" --stonewall --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --zero_buffers=$WRITEZERO --output-format=json --output "$TARGET/.fiomark.txt" --name=4kread --bs=4k --iodepth=1 --numjobs=1 --rw=randread

Intel S4610 4TB
Sequential Read: 525MB/s IOPS=1
Sequential Write: 478MB/s IOPS=0

512KB Read: 355MB/s IOPS=711
512KB Write: 378MB/s IOPS=756

Sequential Q32T1 Read: 535MB/s IOPS=33
Sequential Q32T1 Write: 489MB/s IOPS=30

4KB Read: 24MB/s IOPS=6370
4KB Write: 99MB/s IOPS=25523

4KB Q32T1 Read: 306MB/s IOPS=78345
4KB Q32T1 Write: 317MB/s IOPS=81390

4KB Q8T8 Read: 307MB/s IOPS=78705
4KB Q8T8 Write: 318MB/s IOPS=81450


Random cheap m.2 SATA 512GB:
Sequential Read: 520MB/s IOPS=1
Sequential Write: 446MB/s IOPS=0

512KB Read: 462MB/s IOPS=925
512KB Write: 385MB/s IOPS=770

Sequential Q32T1 Read: 522MB/s IOPS=32
Sequential Q32T1 Write: 458MB/s IOPS=28

4KB Read: 39MB/s IOPS=10084
4KB Write: 112MB/s IOPS=28786

4KB Q32T1 Read: 146MB/s IOPS=37496
4KB Q32T1 Write: 280MB/s IOPS=71733

4KB Q8T8 Read: 148MB/s IOPS=37951
4KB Q8T8 Write: 283MB/s IOPS=72595

 

[bigfellasdad]

Is this just for home use? do you envisage your VMs/LXD's etc needing huge I/O? What is your network performance etc?
Its no use imho to go huge on storage performance if not needed or network bottlenecked, a slow 5400 hdd can flood a 1gig network!!

For my home use, which includes a couple of 5M+ record LDAP servers, an SSD or NVME is more than adequate. As downtime isnt an issue at home, as long as i back up VMs to slow rust nightly, then I am more than covered to recover in case of emergency.

If you are running a CEPH cluster though, for fun, then maybe *if* you have a fast network then better I/O may be of use, but its tenuous.