One of my friends recently installed a new storage server in our shared lab environment and graciously gave me some storage space on it via iSCSI. I use Proxmox for my personal lab, and I intended to store some non-critical VM disks on this new storage so I could play around with properly using HA (High Availability) with Proxmox. Additionally, I wanted to gain some experience using iSCSI at the same time. While I trust my friend, the storage itself is outside of my control, so I figured it would be good practice to encrypt my data. The general go-to solution for this would seem to be LUKS. Read More
Shoehorning Proxmox into mdadm RAID1
My home server has always been somewhat of a Frankenstein’s Monster when it comes to hardware. Until about 2 years ago, it consisted of a large JBOD array of several different drive sizes with no kind of redundancy what-so-ever – for both OS and Data disks. That all changed though when I decided to invest in some 3TB disks and build a “proper” RAID array for my data; Which coincidentally was around the same time my data storage array lost a drive resulting in about 800GB of data-loss – I was unable to source a decent hardware RAID card at the time so I went with Software RAID (mdadm) instead.
The chassis which houses my home server happens to be an old X-Case model that has 10 internal bays, a couple of 5.25″ for Optical drives and a 5.25″ to 3.5″ caddy that seems to be designed for a floppy drive (it has a cut-out at the front for access). I use the floppy slot to house my OS disk and the rest are for my data disks which are all in RAID6 for redundancy. This gives me a total of 11 hard drives in this chassis in its default configuration.
When I rebuilt my server to make use of Proxmox, I put in a known-working drive as the OS drive; It was an old drive at the time but didn’t have much in the way of power on hours so I figured it’d last me a while. Here I am a few years later and the drive is still going, but SMART data is showing some figures that’re making me worried it’s going to start having problems soon so I set about replacing it.