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Storage
91 articles tagged Storage, newest first.
Proxmox Backup Strategy: A Practical 2026 Plan
A practical Proxmox backup plan for 2026 uses PBS 4.2, offsite copies, verification, restore tests, and a recovery target you can measure.
Ceph 19.2.6 Upgrade: Check PG Counts Before You Start
Ceph Squid 19.2.6 is a security update worth installing, but I would not treat a large cluster like a laptop that can be patched first and investigated ...
OpenZFS Offline Dedup: Is ZFS Dedup Finally Practical?
OpenZFS just gained a much more practical way to deduplicate existing files on Linux: upstream master now implements `FIDEDUPERANGE` using ZFS block clo...
Proxmox Storage: ZFS vs Ceph vs LVM Thin vs RAID
For most single-node Proxmox systems, I would choose ZFS when I want local redundancy and snapshots, or LVM Thin when I want simple local block storage.
Does QEMU Limit Proxmox Virtual Machine Performance?
QEMU adds some overhead to every Proxmox virtual machine, but it is rarely the main reason a workload performs poorly.
Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik on Proxmox: Which Reverse Proxy Should You Choose?
A reverse proxy gives applications running on Proxmox consistent domain names, HTTPS certificates and a controlled path from users to internal services.
Plex vs Jellyfin on Proxmox: Which Media Server Is Better?
Plex and Jellyfin can turn a Proxmox server into a centralized platform for streaming movies, television programs, music and other personal media.
QEMU vs KVM in Proxmox: What Is the Difference?
QEMU and KVM are frequently discussed as competing virtualization technologies, but that comparison is misleading.
Should You Run OPNsense on Proxmox in Production?
Running OPNsense as a virtual machine on Proxmox can be a reliable production design.
Should You Run Pi hole in LXC or a VM on Proxmox?
Pi hole needs very little processing power, memory or storage, making it an ideal service to host on Proxmox.
Should You Run Plex in LXC or a VM on Proxmox?
Plex Media Server can run successfully in either a Proxmox LXC container or a virtual machine.
Should You Run the Ubiquiti UniFi Network Application on Proxmox?
Running the Ubiquiti UniFi Network Application on Proxmox can be an efficient way to manage access points, switches and other UniFi network devices with...
UniFi Controller vs UniFi CloudKey: Should You Host UniFi on Proxmox?
A UniFi network needs a management system to adopt access points, configure switches, collect statistics and apply network policies.
How can hot and cold data tiering reduce storage cost while maintaining acceptable application performance?
Hot and cold data tiering reduces storage cost by keeping frequently accessed or performance-sensitive data on faster storage and moving lower-use data ...
SolarWinds Thinks It Can Pull a Broadcom, but Customers Aren’t Buying the Bluff
SolarWinds customers are angry, but the anger has a very specific shape.
Is Terraform the Best Way to Manage Proxmox Infrastructure?
Terraform is one of the most effective tools for creating repeatable Proxmox infrastructure.
OPNsense vs pfSense on Proxmox: Which Virtual Firewall Is Better?
Running a firewall as a Proxmox virtual machine can reduce hardware requirements and make network services easier to back up, migrate and restore.
Should You Run Portainer in LXC or a VM on Proxmox?
Portainer provides a graphical interface for managing Docker containers, images, volumes, networks and application stacks.
Should You Run Traefik in Docker, LXC or a VM on Proxmox?
Traefik can run in several ways on Proxmox.
Traefik vs Nginx Proxy Manager on Proxmox: Which Is Easier?
Running several applications on Proxmox usually creates a routing problem.
Proxmox Kernel 6.14 Just Got Cut Loose, and Homelab Admins Are Feeling the Floor Move
Kernel news usually lands like dry toast: necessary, technical, and easy to ignore until something breaks.
GlusterFS Was Supposed to Be Dead. Then Someone Dragged It Back Into Proxmox.
There’s a certain kind of removal that feels less like cleanup and more like a door being slammed on a whole class of users.
The Proxmox Installer Didn’t Fail. That Monster PC Probably Did.
There’s a familiar ritual when a fresh server build refuses to install an operating system: blame the USB stick.
Ansible vs Terraform for Proxmox Automation: Which Should You Use?
Manually creating Proxmox virtual machines works well when an environment contains a few stable workloads.
Can Ansible Fully Automate a Proxmox Cluster?
Ansible can automate most of a Proxmox cluster’s routine lifecycle, including node preparation, cluster creation, virtual machine deployment, storage co...
Terraform vs Manual Proxmox Deployment: Which Is More Reliable?
Creating a virtual machine manually through the Proxmox interface can feel more reliable than using Terraform.
A Stack of Cheap Lenovos and a Raspberry Pi Turned Into the Perfect Homelab Rabbit Hole
A pile of Lenovo mini machines, a Raspberry Pi 5, and one very dangerous question: what should this cluster run?
Proxmox 8 to 9 Went So Smoothly It Made People Suspicious of Their Own Anxiety
Major infrastructure upgrades usually come with a little ritual dread.
Proxmox Kernel Updates Are Exhausting, But Ignoring Them Feels Even Worse
Kernel updates have been coming fast enough lately that even patient Proxmox users are starting to feel the grind.
Proxmox Mail Gateway 9.1 Is a Boring Release in the Best Possible Way
Proxmox Mail Gateway 9.1 didn’t spark a sprawling argument, which almost feels strange for infrastructure software.
PVE-Electrified Is the Kind of Proxmox Mod That Starts a UI Knife Fight
PVE-electrified is not trying to be subtle.
Virtual OS Museum on Proxmox Is Retro Heaven With a Network Gremlin Hiding Inside
The idea is irresistible: take the Virtual OS Museum, stuff it into a Proxmox VM, and suddenly your modern hypervisor becomes a time machine for VAX/VMS...
Amazon’s Water Number Looks Huge Until the Real Fight Starts
Amazon’s data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year, and that number was basically engineered to make people stop scrolling.
The AI Data Center Race Just Turned Into a Power Race, and Nobody Looks Ready
A $295 billion AI data center buildout is the kind of number that makes everyone stop pretending this is just another infrastructure cycle.
The Data Center Panic Is Getting Loud, Weird, and Exhausting
The latest wave of data center panic has a very specific flavor: part privacy fear, part infrastructure confusion, part “1984” cosplay.
The Data Center Panic Is Overblown, But the Bill Is Still Coming
The phrase “data-center panic” sounds like something cooked up by people who just discovered the cloud has walls, wires, and utility bills.
Proxmox Quietly Dropped an iOS App, and Homelab Owners Are Feeling Weirdly Seen
A strange little jolt hits when a tool you use every day quietly appears somewhere you didn’t expect.
Press Update and Pray: The Proxmox 9.2 Upgrade Has Admins Excited, Nervous, and Already Checking Their Backups
Proxmox VE 9.2 is turning into one of those upgrades that sounds exciting right up until you remember what kind of machines it’s supposed to touch.
The LXC vs VM Debate Is Really About Fear, Control, and How Much Isolation Helps You Sleep at Night
The question sounded innocent: when should someone use an LXC, and when should they use a VM?
The Proxmox 8.2.7 to 9.2 Upgrade Sounds Simple Until You Remember It’s Six Servers and a Backup Box
The post was simple, but it carried the exact weight that makes infrastructure upgrades uncomfortable: can I upgrade directly from Proxmox 8.2.7 to 9.2,...
The Moment a 40GB/s Storage Beast Hit the Wall — Then Grew Even Bigger
There’s a certain kind of excitement that only infrastructure people understand.
The Storage Platform That Looked Ready — Until Operators Started Living With It
Enterprise storage buying decisions rarely fail on day one.
VAST Data’s AI OS Has People Asking One Brutal Question: Is This Real Infrastructure or Just AI Theater?
There’s a special kind of exhaustion that hits infrastructure people when another vendor walks in and says the words “AI-ready.” You can almost hear the...
The Weird Little Secret Behind HPE MSA and Dell PowerVault: Sometimes Your “Different” Storage Array Isn’t That Different
Enterprise storage has a funny way of making simple things look mysterious.
Kubernetes’ Quiet Security Revolution Is Here—and It Might Break Everything Before It Fixes Anything
Six years of development, testing, iteration, and probably a lot of second-guessing, and user namespaces in Kubernetes didn’t arrive with fireworks.
Six Years of Silence Explodes Into One Feature That Could Quietly Rewrite Kubernetes Security Forever
**“Six Years of Silence Explodes Into One Feature That Could Quietly Rewrite Kubernetes Security Forever”** ## A Feature Years in the Making Finally Su...
Your Digital Life Will Outlive You—And You’re Probably Handling It Completely Wrong
**“Your Digital Life Will Outlive You—And You’re Probably Handling It Completely Wrong”** ## The Quiet Panic Behind a Simple Question It starts innoce...
Two VMAX Cabinets, One Painful Truth: Some Enterprise Storage Was Never Meant to Be Reborn
There’s something oddly emotional about seeing old enterprise storage sitting there, still physically impressive, still full of metal, fans, controllers...
The DIY SAN Rabbit Hole: One Engineer Asked How Modern Storage Really Works, and the Answer Got Complicated Fast
There’s a certain kind of question that cuts through the usual enterprise storage noise.
The $800-a-Month Tape Vault Nobody Wants to Explain Anymore
There’s a very specific kind of shame that lives inside old infrastructure line items.
The Storage Admin Isn’t Dead — But the Job Is Losing Its Old Skin Fast
For almost two decades, storage admins have been told their job was about to disappear.
Your SSD Isn't Safe Just Because It's New: The Firmware Gamble Most Homelab Users Ignore
Why SSD firmware gets ignored until it causes real pain, and how homelab users balance risk, complacency, and low-level storage maintenance.
Your Snapshots Aren't Broken, Your Assumptions Are: The 5TB Shock That Exposes a Hidden ZFS Trap
A plain-English explanation of why ZFS snapshot space usage can look completely wrong until you understand the assumptions that were wrong all along.
VAST Buying Red Stapler Feels Like a Cloud Pivot With a Giant Question Mark Attached
There’s a moment in enterprise storage when a company stops sounding like a storage company and starts sounding like it wants to become a platform for e...
You're Mounting It Wrong: The NFS Mistake That Keeps Breaking Homelabs
A practical breakdown of the NFS mistakes that confuse homelab users, especially when they expect shared storage to behave like a local VM disk.
Am I Screwed? The Moment a Homelab Turns Into a Data Loss Horror Story
A power outage, failing NVMe reads, and unsupported repair tooling turned one homelab recovery attempt into a blunt lesson about backups and storage risk.
The Moment Someone Called Unraid “Enterprise Storage” and the Room Got Very Quiet
There are arguments in IT that start politely and then slowly reveal something much bigger than the technology being discussed.
The NetApp–VAST Lawsuit Is the Kind of Storage Drama That Makes Buyers Freeze
Enterprise storage usually saves its drama for outages, bad firmware, failed migrations, and renewal quotes that arrive looking like ransom notes.
Windows Server Finally Got Serious About NVMe — and Storage People Still Don’t Trust It Yet
There are few things more satisfying in infrastructure than watching an old assumption get punched in the mouth by a benchmark.
TrueNAS 25.10.2 Is Here - and It's the Kind of Update That Quietly Saves You From Disaster
A practical breakdown of TrueNAS 25.10.2 fixes that prevent upgrade failures, SMB migration issues, and NFS edge-case instability.
BTRFS Inside Proxmox VMs: Smart Flexibility or a CoW-on-CoW Trap Waiting to Happen?
Using BTRFS inside Proxmox VMs can be great for snapshots and subvolumes, but stacking CoW on CoW (especially on ZFS hosts) can introduce serious IO overhead and fragmentation risks.
Your 25GbE Dream Is Slamming Into a Wall: The Brutal Truth About My 3-Node Ceph Cluster
A 3-node Proxmox + Ceph lab with enterprise NVMe and 25GbE looked perfect on paper, but benchmark ceilings exposed the practical bottlenecks that matter most in small clusters.
The Most Dangerous Storage Question Isn’t SSD vs Hard Drive — It’s Why You Trust One Disk at All
There’s a beautiful simplicity to the question: if you had very important files being read and written 24/7 for a long time, would you trust them more o...
MinIO repo archived - spent 2 days testing K8s S3-compatible alternatives (Helm/Docker)
Hey, MinIO repo got archived on Feb 13, been hunting a K8s-ready S3 object storage for two days.
Two-Node Clusters, Fibre Channel, and a Leap of Faith: Inside a VMware-to-Proxmox Migration
An IT team managing 10 clusters and 21 hosts across global sites is migrating its entire VMware infrastructure to Proxmox, navigating architectural constraints and storage complexities that don't appear in vendor documentation.
The Storage Refresh That Starts as NetApp vs Pure vs Dell and Ends as a Fight Over Your Future Self
Storage decisions have a way of pretending they’re about hardware.
Looking for a replacement for Minio? S3 made easy with Garage
**Update: garage-operator v0.1.x released — Kubernetes operator for Garage (self-hosted S3 storage)** About a month ago I shared a project I’ve been building: a Kubernetes opera...
Deduplication Nightmares: What to Use When TAR Slows You Down
TAR archives and deduplication don't always play nice. Here's why your backup strategy might be underperforming and what alternatives exist for dedup-aware archiving.
Ceph, StarWind, Synology: How I Accidentally Tried Every Storage Idea at Once
A story about running Ceph, StarWind VSAN, and Synology simultaneously—not by design, but because every attempt to simplify storage somehow added another layer instead.
The 200TB Tape Killer Everyone Wants to Believe In — But Storage People Have Seen This Movie Before
There’s a very specific kind of excitement that happens when someone claims they can replace tape.
Why Your Proxmox Migration Failed (Hint: It Wasn't Proxmox)
Most failed Proxmox migrations aren't Proxmox failures at all. They're the result of assumptions VMware spent 15 years teaching us to make — and infrastructure that stopped hiding its complexity.
Ceph, StarWind, or Something Else? The Awkward Middle Ground of HA Storage in Proxmox
When you want your Proxmox storage to 'just stay up' during node failures, you hit the awkward middle ground between Ceph, StarWind VSAN, clustered filesystems, and DIY NAS solutions. Here's why none of them feel quite right.
Tape Storage Was Supposed to Be Dead — Then Someone Showed Up With 50PB and a Reality Check
Every few years, someone declares tape storage dead with the confidence of a person who has never had to preserve tens of petabytes inside a closed site.
Cheapest S3-Compatible Storage for Proxmox Backup in 2026 (Real Costs)
Wasabi vs Backblaze B2 vs Hetzner Storage Box for Proxmox Backup Server in 2026: real monthly costs, egress fees, and reliability tradeoffs compared.
Proxmox Clusters and SANs: The VMware Exit Problem Nobody Warned You About
Leaving VMware for Proxmox? Your SAN-backed cluster won't behave the same way—and that gap in expectations catches many teams flat-footed.
The 120PB Storage Question That Makes Every “Just Use Open Source” Answer Feel Suddenly Expensive
There are storage questions, and then there are storage questions that make everyone in the room sit up straighter. One hundred and twenty petabytes for HPC and AI in support of quantitative research is the second kind.
Proxmox in the Enterprise: The Gotchas VMware Admins Don't See Coming
VMware admins migrating to Proxmox face unexpected challenges that go beyond technical specs. From storage design to NUMA tuning and Windows licensing, here are the real-world gotchas experienced engineers wish they'd known before starting their migration.
What's the Most Cost-Effective Way to Run Ceph at Home?
From mini-PCs to pizza box servers, homelab enthusiasts share their real-world Ceph builds. Here's what actually works without breaking the bank.
USB vs SATA: The Unexpected Debate Behind Virtualized PBS Storage
When downsizing forces you to virtualize PBS, choosing between USB and SATA storage becomes more than a technical decision—it's a philosophy about reliability, convenience, and what 'good enough' really means.
How One Bad API Call Took Down an Entire Ceph Cluster
A single malformed curl request crashed every monitor in a Ceph cluster, freezing VMs and bringing down an entire homelab. Here's how one admin rebuilt from scratch — and what we can all learn about API validation in distributed systems.
No Budget for Enterprise Drives? Here's How Proxmox Users Are Fighting SSD Wearout Anyway
Proxmox SSD wearout guide: reduce write amplification, tune ZFS, and extend consumer drive life when enterprise SSDs are out of budget.
Six Grand, Twelve Drives, and One Dream: How a 200TB Server Became a Portfolio
One engineer built a 200TB Proxmox and TrueNAS system from scratch—not for work, but as proof of skill. This is the story of how a homelab became a living resume.
Ceph, HA, and the Minimum Viable Cluster for SMBs
Exploring the smallest Proxmox cluster setup that makes sense for high availability with Ceph—from 2-node setups with QDevices to the community's recommended 3-5 node configurations.
Mobile-First, API-Driven, and RAIDZ-Ready: Why Unraid 7.2.0 Is a Game-Changer
Unraid 7.2.0 brings a responsive mobile UI, ZFS RAIDZ expansion, and a built-in API. Here's why the community is calling this update a game-changer.
Running PBS on the Same Host? Here's Why Your Backups Might Crawl
High-end hardware but slow backups? Learn why running Proxmox Backup Server in a VM on the same host creates bottlenecks—and what you can do about it.
TrueNAS, Ubuntu, or Unraid: What's the Best OS for Your Offsite Backup Server?
TrueNAS vs Ubuntu vs Unraid for offsite backups: compare cost, setup complexity, ransomware resilience, and long-term maintenance for homelab storage.
The Sneaky Problem of Full Storage: How Proxmox Users Are Beating LVM-Thin Bloat
Proxmox LVM-thin filling up? Learn practical fixes to reclaim space, prevent pool bloat, and stop backup or VM failures before they happen.
Ceph Is a Beast, ZFS Just Works: Inside the Storage Wars of the Proxmox Community
Ceph vs ZFS in Proxmox homelabs: a practical comparison of complexity, failure handling, and performance for real-world self-hosted clusters.
Proxmox HA Storage: Ceph vs ZFS Replication vs NAS Failover Compared
Ceph vs ZFS vs NAS for Proxmox HA: tradeoffs, failure patterns, and architecture choices that improve reliability without overengineering.
When Proxmox and iSCSI Just Don't Click: What Ex-VMware Users Need to Know
Migrating from VMware to Proxmox? If your Proxmox iSCSI storage performance is a nightmare, you're not alone. Here's what's wrong—and what to fix.
ZFS Configuration Guide for Optimal Performance
Master ZFS pool creation, tuning, and best practices for data integrity and speed.