Should I use a hardware raid controller or ZFS
I'm setting of Proxmox for the first time for my homelab. I have 6x2tb 2.5 enterprise sata ssds, 4x1tb consumer NVMe m.2 drives, 2x256gb enterprise m.2 sata drives.
My initial plan was to use my servers hardware RAID controller to setup the 6x2tbs into a RAID5 and use it as a data storage, the 4x1tb NVMe drives I was going to JBOD together for VM OS drives and the 2x256gb m.2 sata drives would be for proxmox OS. The RAID controllers are HP SMART Array P816i and S100i controllers.
But I'm wondering if its better to pass everything to proxmox and ZFS everything 6x2tbs would be a zfs1 or zfs2 pool. NVMe would be a zfs1 pool, and the os drives would be a ZFS mirror.
I will be using Veeam 13.0.1 to do backups to a backup server of everything.
This is my first time using proxmox and am migrating from ESXi 8.
Posted Jun 12, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC