I am just getting into setting up a home server. I recently purchased a used HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF computer with i5-7500 CPU. It came with a 256 NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD. I checked with crystal disk info and both drives seem to be in good condition.

I am planning to set up Proxmox on it, spin up a debian virtual machine, and use docker compose for most of my applications. Before I get going, I want to make sure my hard drive storage is set up properly.

I plan to install Proxmox on the NVMe drive. I purchased a 4TB seagate barracuda HDD that I would like to have mirror the 1TB HDD that came with the computer for storage. My plan was to replace the 1TB drive once I approach 1TB in storage as it feels like a waste to just replace it now especially since I don’t yet have that much data. Is this possible to do this with two different hard drive sizes? Can I simply replace the 1TB drive with another 4TB drive in the future if needed?

Thank you!

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  • HTWingNut@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    4TB seagate barracuda HDD

    Return it. It’s SMR and trash. Go with Exos or Ironwolf or WD Red Plus/Pro, Gold, or Utlrastar.

    Can I simply replace the 1TB drive with another 4TB drive in the future if needed?

    Generally yes, it is not an issue, but depends on the RAID config you use.

    • smoknjoe44@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Ok cool thanks for the heads up on the drive. I will return it. I also have two 1TB SSD drives on hand. You think I should just mirror those two instead of doing HDD drives?

      Also in regard to your comment about RAID set up, how do you suggest I do that if I go with HDD drive?

  • Sopel97@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    As mentioned the 4TB Barracuda is an SMR drive. These are pretty useless for RAID as their write speeds are abysmal. In case a resilver is needed it’d take like 10 times longer than with CMR drives, completely defeating the point of RAID. See https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/

    At least ZFS allows increasing the size of the drives within a mirror pool. Not sure about other RAID setups but it’s a pretty easy feature to support so I would expect virtually everything to have it.