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!
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.
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?
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.