Sadly, it seems I cannot replace the disks one-by-one. At least not if I don’t upgrade the SSD size to greater than 4TB at the same time.

The consumer 4TB SSDs yield 3,64 TiB, whereas the datacenter 4TB SSDs seem to yield 3,49 TiB. As far as I know, one cannot replace a zfs raid z1 drive with a smaller one. I’ll have to watch the current consumer SSDs closely and be prepared for when I’ll have to switch them.

I’m not all too sure about buying used IT / stuff in general from ebay, but I’ll have a look, thanks!

Thank you very much for your input, I’ll definitely have to go with business drives whenever the current ones die.

Thankfully, I do have monitoring for SMART data and drive health, so I’ll be warned before something bad happens.

Thank you very much for your input. I’ll definitely have to go for the business models whenever the current ones die.

I knew I would make some mistake and learn something new, with this being my first real server-PC (instead of mini-pc or raspberry pi) and RAID. I just wished it wasn’t that pricey of a mistake :(

Yeah, I guess I should’ve put like +50% more money into it and gotten some Enterprise SSDs instead. Well, what’s done is done now.

I’ll try replacing the disks with enterprise SSDs when they die, which will probably happen fast, seeing as the wearout is already at 1% after 1 month of low usage.

What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

So I just looked it up: According to Proxmox VE “disks” interface, my SATA SSD drives have 1% wearout after ~1 month of low usage. That seems pretty horrible.

I guess I’m going to wait until they die and buy enterprise SSDs as a replacement.

I’m definitely not going to use HDDs, as the server is in my living room and I’m not going to tolerate constant HDD sounds.

[EDIT] I don’t even have a cluster, it’s just a single Proxmox VE on a single server using ZFS and it’s still writing itself to death.

[EDIT2] What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for your input!

I don’t know about tailscale, but it seems pihole has got you covered with local DNS, if you’re willing to set the local DNS records manually.

I use pihole as selfhosted DNS server for all my servers and clients. I don’t have many local DNS records (only 2), so if you handle a great amount of ever-changing DNS records, this might not be for you.

To me it seems like:

• you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
• but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try

I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.

I recommend these because:

• Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
• Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
• you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
• includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …

I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.

It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of virsh console commands or virt-manager.

I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.

Thank you very much. I sent this to my coworker who expressed interest in switching to vim :)

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE, Hypervisor), my beloved. Especially in combination with Proxmox Backup Server (PBS).

My homelab would not exist without Proxmox VE, as I’m definitely not going to use Nutanix or VMWare. I love working with linux and Proxmox VE is literally debian with a modified kernel and a Management Webinterface on top.

I first learned about Proxmox VE in my company, while we still had VMWare for us and all of our customers. We gradually switched everyone over to Proxmox VE and now I’m using it at home too. Proxmox is an Austrian (my country) company, so I was double hyped about this software.

A few things I like most about Proxmox VE

• Ease of access to the correct part of the documentation you currently need (*)
• Open Source
• Company resides in my country (no US big tech walled garden)
• Linux / Debian based, so no learning new OS’s and toolchains
• Free version available
• Forum available and actually used

(*) What I mean by ease of access to the correct part of the documentation is: Whenever you’re in the WebUI and need to decide on some settings, there’s a button somewhere on the same page which is going to lead you directly to the portion of the documentation you need right now. I don’t know why this seems like such a great luxury, every software should have something like this.

Next steps

My “server” (some mini PC with spare parts I already had) is getting too weak for the workload I put it through, so I’m going to migrate to a better “server”. I already have a PC and most of the necessary parts, I just need some SSDs and an AMD CPU.

Even migrating from PVE (old) -> PVE (new) couldn’t be easier:

• PVE (old): create last backup to PBS, shut down PVE (old)
• PVE (new): add PBS, restore Backups
• ???
• profit

I think it’s great to have a series posting about personal achievements and troubles with selfhosting. There’s so much software out there, you always get to see someone doing something you didn’t even know could be done or using a software you didn’t realize even existed. Sharing is caring.