My disk benchmark results for a few VPS providers, run with fio. Binary Lane performs well despite only advertising SSD storage, while I find the difference between Digital Ocean’s SSD and NVMe offerings disappointing, though contention on shared drives may explain some of that...
After adding NVMe drives and an external USB NVMe mirror to my Proxmox homelab, I benchmark four storage options — internal NVMe, SATA SSD with ZFS, Synology NAS, and external ZFS pool — using fio write tests to decide where live VM disks should live. Results upend expectations: the NAS is fastest for parallel writes, the external enclosure disappoints, and ZFS compression carries a real cost on small random writes. The upshot is ZFS without compression on the SATA SSDs, trading some speed for data integrity and easy snapshot transfers...
A step-by-step walkthrough of installing 256GB NVMe drives in the M.2 slot of HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini machines. My Proxmox nodes will boot from the new drives, letting the existing SSDs — whose SMART reporting is unreliable — run ZFS with scrubbing for data integrity. I cover opening the case, removing the drive cage to reach the M.2 slots, seating the drive, and reassembly, along with a note that M.2 mounting screws typically need to be ordered separately...
