Storage

My home servers · Part 4

New Proxmox homeserver

My current Proxmox server

My main Proxmox server is called phoebe. It is a Lenovo Tiny PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE processor and 64 GB of RAM, and it runs a couple of LXC containers (Nextcloud among them) and a few virtual machines.

Its storage used to be an NVMe drive for booting and two spinning drives in an OpenZFS mirror: a 4 TB 2.5" hard disk drive inside the case and an 8 TB external drive connected via USB 3. That gave 4 TB of usable space, as the smallest drive in a mirror dictates the capacity.

Proxmox from scratch · Part 1

Setting up a Proxmox Virtual Environment server

This is the first part of Proxmox from scratch. By the end of it you have a server running Proxmox Virtual Environment, reachable from a browser and up to date. The following parts build on it: virtual machines, containers, storage, networking and backups.

Everything here is done on Proxmox VE 9.2, which came out in May 2026 [7]. If you find an older guide for version 8, be aware that 8 stopped getting security updates on 31 August 2026 [7].

Explainer: What is RAID?

Reading about servers and storage you might have wondered: What is RAID? RAID is a method of melting multiple harddrives together to form a (often) larger logical drive. The acronym expands to either Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

RAID was defined in a research paper: “A case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)” (Patterson et al, 1988). Andrew S Tanenbaum uses the latter acronym in his book (“Structured Computer Organization 5th Edition”, Tanenbaum, 2006, p 89). I had access to the 5th edition, from which I reference but you can get the 6th edition from Amazon.com and amazon.de (affiliate links).