Running Proxmox on a single drive for 2 years

November 2023. I needed a quick lab box for testing LXC vs. KVM overhead on a Contabo E3 dedi. "Two weeks," I said. "Just until the second drive arrives."

The second drive never arrived. Budget got reallocated. The single Samsung PM883 480GB sat there, running Proxmox VE 8, hosting twelve containers and four VMs, accumulating snapshots I never pruned.

The virtualization tax on a single drive is real. No mirror meant every write hit the same NAND, no ZFS checksums to catch bitrot, and when the SMART shift bit crossed 10% I started running

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Two years of "it'll fail tomorrow" from this forum. Yesterday it finally did. Kernel panic, remount read-only, 0x0B "percentage used" at 102%.

Restored from a 3-month-old backup to a fresh pair of WD Reds in ZFS mirror. Lost some test configs. Gained religion.

Lesson: ZFS mirror or don't bother. The virtualization tax is bad enough without adding storage tax on top.

Wesh kate, incha'allah le server حلو now with le mirror, non ? Two years on single ssd... I would not sleep, me. I run only zfs since 2019 ; never a problem, alhamdulillah.

Þis is þe real sin: proxmox on single drive for two years and you worried about containers? Þe systemd unit for pve-cluster alone writes enough journal noise to burn þrough flash. I run nothing at home. Bare metal or death.