Guidance needed on structuring/planning TrueNAS HDD/SSD setup for PROXMOX

[MrBenedict]

Hi everyone,

following situation:

I have an old (Dell T20) which I plan to run Proxmox on and to basically use it for playing around with containers and stuff and some mini projects. (like VPN, PiHole, NextCloud, paperless-ngx and just basic storage for e.g. drone footage)
One of those projects should be TrueNAS (obv. because that's why I'm writing in this forum ).

Coming to the points:
I have several HDDs laying around which I want to use for TrueNAS, but need your guy's input and best practices on how to structure the different HDDs I have, and I probably still need to buy, to make this a proper setup to run with TrueNAS.

- 1x 120GB SSD
- 1x 8TB Seagate
- 3x 2TB WD Green

What I do understand so far is, that for Storage Pools TrueNAS would require a minimum amount of HDDs of the same size to setup a proper RAID configuration.

Questions I have:

- I thought about running proxmox off the 120GB SSD and buy and additional e.g. 1TB SSD to run the containers on - would that make sense?
- do configure e.g. a RAID5 pool in TN does only the size of the HDD have to be the same, or does it require to be the same model?
- I currently consider (based on the HDDs I have) even building 2 storage pools - would that make sense?


I would really appreciate if you could share your opinions and experiences on that.
Cheers - Ben

 

[sretalla]

- I thought about running proxmox off the 120GB SSD and buy and additional e.g. 1TB SSD to run the containers on - would that make sense?

You can assign a virtual disk (file) for TrueNAS to boot from, no need to assign a whole SSD.
Get another SSD for containers if you want.

- do configure e.g. a RAID5 pool in TN does only the size of the HDD have to be the same, or does it require to be the same model?

RAIDZ1 (which is what you mean to say) doesn't require either of those things, but will operate all disks at the size of the smallest member of the VDEV, so same size is sensible to do to avoid waste, but not mandatory... brand/model doesn't matter, but similarly, the speed of the VDEV is determined by the slowest member, so you might consider that too.

- I currently consider (based on the HDDs I have) even building 2 storage pools - would that make sense?

A second 8TB would get you a nice Mirrored pool of 8TB... otherwise you're talking about a stripe (with no redundancy) and a RAIDZ with single-disk redundancy.

As you want.

 

[sretalla]

Also worth mentioning (as you haven't made it clear in your plan) that in order to not put your data at risk, you will need to pass an entire PCI SATA/SAS controller into the TrueNAS VM and only use disks attached to that controller:

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

If you're just playing around and the data doesn't matter, then not so important, but fair warning.

 

[MrBenedict]

Thanks a lot for that.

RAIDZ1 (which is what you mean to say) doesn't require either of those things, but will operate all disks at the size of the smallest member of the VDEV, so same size is sensible to do to avoid waste, but not mandatory... brand/model doesn't matter, but similarly, the speed of the VDEV is determined by the slowest member, so you might consider that too.

Yip RAIDZ1 is what I meant.
If you are saying vdev speed is determined by the slowest member(...) you mean speed in the matter of read/write speed right? or the rpm?