That are many ways to go about this project. I could summarize everything after reaching some kind of finished state. Choosing not to take that path. Here, I met some challenges. What could’ve taken a few hours, ended up taking months, when we account for shipping.
I’m keeping that in, instead of describing this entire process like it’s far more planned and researched than it is, after every challenge is solved.
Researching RAIDs, I came across this video[0] explaining some issues with hardware RAIDs.
That lead to the decision that I will be using ZFS, with 2 parity drives for the 4x 1TB drives. Mirrored 250G for Proxmox itself.
Turns out, H700 does not support non-RAID drives. Seemingly not even with firmware flashing. While it is possible to create two single-SSD RAID0’s, the OpenZFS documentation[1] explicitly says not to.
Some weeks after a trip to eBay, my H710 arrived. This by itself does not seem to solve all my challenges, but it is listed as a card that supports being flashed.
As such, I followed a guide[2], and tada, physical disks (IT mode) is now supported. A bit closer to the goal.
Just for the record, I yolo’d a bit, as it was NOT an exact match like the guide says it needs to be. But from what I can tell, it very much worked.
With the physical drives supported, the Proxmox VE installer made it very simple to set up a mirrored raid with ZFS.
Although, after the installation was completed, nothing booted. I suspected this was due to the ZFS file system not being recognized. Tried EXT4 instead. That didn’t work either.
Turns out, I missed a key part of the manual. Flashing boot image is not optional when you plan to boot from the adapter. After that single command was run, and a reboot, I was able to boot Proxmox.
Though, this was now EXT4 proxmox, so I installed it once again, with RAID1 ZFS.
And thus, Proxmox is successfully installed and working the way I hoped for.
The remaining 4 drives are set up with RAIDZ2, allowing 2 disks to fail. Possibly overkill, time will show if I need more space soon, or drives keeps failing.
Had a blackplate warning. Fixed by properly plugging in one of the cables on the controller. Figured I’d have SSD warnings if a cable was loose, but everything worked.
This[3] might’ve helped the ridiculus fan speed, but still using the commands mentioned earlier to make it reasonably quiet.
With that, I’m gonna move onto building the rest.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI
[1] https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance%20and%20Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers
[2] https://fohdeesha.com/docs/H710-D1-full.html
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/dinl06/im_sure_this_has_been_posted_before_disable_3rd/