I'm setting up an older Dell PowerEdge as a home-lab server and plan to run a hypervisor such as Proxmox, Nutanix, or CloudStack, although I haven't chosen one yet. Before buying disks, I'd like to choose a storage layout that balances cost, fault tolerance, and performance—with cost being the top priority. Ideally, I'd start with the minimum number of drives and expand the storage later as my budget allows. Critical data will also be backed up to a NAS. Is RAID 1 unnecessarily wasteful for this use case, and which RAID level or storage approach would be easiest and most practical to expand over time?
4 Answers
If the server supports it, putting the controller into HBA, IT, or passthrough mode and letting ZFS manage the disks is often preferable to layering ZFS on top of hardware RAID. You’ll still need a boot device, and ZFS is generally best used with reliable drives and enough memory. Consumer disks can be a poor fit depending on the controller and workload.
For a virtualization host, a common layout is a small mirrored pair for the hypervisor operating system and a separate RAID 10 or ZFS mirror-based pool for VM storage. RAID 10 gives good performance and fault tolerance, and you can usually expand by adding additional matching mirror pairs—but confirm that the specific RAID controller supports that kind of expansion before buying drives.
Don’t assume that adding disks later will be straightforward. Some controllers can expand RAID 5 or RAID 6 arrays, while others have limited or awkward support for expanding RAID 10. Check the exact PERC model first—features such as RAID level support, cache, passthrough, and online expansion vary significantly. Also remember that RAID is not a backup, so keeping important data on the NAS is still essential.
The best choice depends heavily on whether you’re using SSDs or hard drives, how many drive bays you have, and what the PowerEdge controller supports. RAID 10 is usually a strong choice for VM workloads on hard drives. RAID 5 can be a budget-friendly lab option, while RAID 6 becomes more attractive for larger arrays or when using several SSDs, though both parity layouts can have tradeoffs during writes and rebuilds.
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