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...
After reading up on Proxmox’s storage setup, I check the Wearout percentages of the SSDs in my second-hand HP Elitedesk nodes and find one no-name drive reporting 100% wearout despite passing its SMART health check. I examine the drive’s SMART attributes, attempt a short SMART test that gets aborted, and consider buying new SSDs ahead of a planned move to a high-availability cluster with NAS, Ceph, or ZFS storage...
