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Decisions

ADR 0001: The Dell T330 dedicated to storage

The T330 becomes the storage machine (ZFS RAIDZ2, PBS); compute moves to a dedicated cluster.

superseded #proxmox#zfs#storage 2 min read

Superseded decision. This decision was superseded by ADR 0010 on 26/09/2026. It is kept for the record.

Context

The T330 (8 hot-plug bays, 32 GB DDR4 ECC, PERC H330) was first meant to host everything: firewall, storage and services. One machine for everything is a single point of failure, and every maintenance takes the whole lot down.

Options considered

  1. Everything on the T330: simple, but fragile and hard to maintain.
  2. T330 for storage only, compute on a cluster: separate roles, as in a company.
  3. TrueNAS SCALE on the T330: very well suited to a NAS, but one more tool to master.

Decision

The T330 stays on Proxmox VE (one tool across the whole infrastructure, driven by OpenTofu) and carries only storage: a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool on 4 SAS disks, the PERC H330 in HBA mode, Proxmox Backup Server for the cluster’s backups.

Consequences

  • About 6 TB usable, two disk failures tolerated (relevant with second-hand disks).
  • NAS data and backups on the same machine: an encrypted off-site copy is mandatory.
  • VM disks are not stored on the NAS, so as not to make it a single point of failure for the cluster.

Update (07/10/2026)

The pool grew to five disks (RAIDZ2 expansion on 05/10, 13.6 TB raw, ≈ 8 TB usable once the data is rewritten) and a worn disk was replaced by the spare on 06/10: see the journal entry of 07/10.