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...
Persuaded by the 2.5 Admins podcast’s enthusiasm for ZFS, I set up a mirrored ZFS pool in Proxmox using two 256GB NVME drives in a USB dual-bay enclosure. My walkthrough covers creating the pool via the Proxmox web GUI, a primer on ZFS terminology (pools, vdevs, datasets), and basic tasks like moving VM disks onto the pool and running a scrub. I also note enclosure temperatures under load and possible sustained write slowdowns on the Samsung PM981 SSDs...
