this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Best practice for mounting usb storage in Proxmox (feddit.uk)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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I've got 3 HDDs connected to my Proxmox machine via usb3. They worked fine until this week. I have them mounted and passed through to OMV.

One failed on Sunday. It was fine one minute, I rebooted and Proxmox wouldn't boot...

Couldn't work out why it wouldn't boot and reflashed Proxmox, losing all my machines (I have since learned the importance of backups since I had none).

I've spent 4 days rewriting it all. Rebooted last night and it happened again, but this time I noticed that it was struggling to find one of my drives and edited them out of Fstab and got it booting again.

I've since added 2/3 drives back in by adding "nofail" to my Fstab entries but my main storage drive is now showing as 100gb instead of 1tb and won't pass through to OMV.

I've come to the conclusion that they were mounted by label and "forgot" their label, hence wouldn't boot, they're now mounted by UUID.

So has anyone got any tips on the best way to mount these things without killing my whole setup?

Also if anyone knows why my storage is showing as 100gb in Proxmox and won't pass through to OMV now I would be eternally grateful. Kinda want to get the files off that drive...

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is why people say not to use USB for permanent storage. But, to answer the question:

  • From memory, “nofail” means the machine continues to boot if the drive does not show up which explains why it’s showing up as 100GB: you’re seeing the size of the disk mounted to / .
  • If the only purpose of these drives is to be passed through to Open Media Vault, why not pass through the drives as USB devices? At least that way only OMV will fail and not the whole host.
  • Why USB? Can the drives ve shucked and connected directly to the host or do they use a propriety connector to the drive itself that prevents that?
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah I was considering passing usb though, or even nofail mounting usb instead of UUID.

They're sata connection but my host is a tiny pc with minimal internals. I just had the drives lying around so decided to try a USB to Sata cable which worked until it didn't. That's why usb.

I did not realise that Proxmox would fail if the devices did, and I'm a little annoyed I didn't notice it on Sunday when it died for the first time, because I started fresh and ended up losing YEARS worth of Home Assistant automations.

Live and learn.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I hope you are doing 3-2-1 backups now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Not quite there yet. I need to add the CIFS connection to Proxmox now to save to the drives (I'll have to do a little research). I still have to set up the Google Drive add-on in Home Assistant again, and set it up properly this time so it actually schedules backups.

Also need to figure out how to off site backup my Proxmox backups. More research

Edit: worked out CIFS to Proxmox now, got a backup solution. Just have to work out how to get them off-site but I could maybe have my PC pull the files for now and maybe sync to Drive as off-site.

Edit2: Gdrive add-on added and set up in Home Assistant now.

I'm giving you these updates because you held me to account on the backup side, and I appreciate that. I had my head in setting my server back up, not back-ups. So thanks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I also use Proxmox Backup Server to backup my VMs. These and the files of my NAS get copied on one of two 22TB HDDs, which I swap out weekly from my fireproof safe. My PC files get synced on my NAS through GoodSync and my Smartphone NeoBackups via Syncthing. My PC also does a Disk2VHD image every month and TrueNAS keeps daily snapshots for two months.

I lost 2TB of data about 15 years ago, I vowed to never let this happen again

[–] LinusSexTips 1 points 8 months ago

If you've got a m.2 slot in the mini PC you could add a cheap 5 sata port m.2 and connect them that way. If you don't want to solder power you could really make it a butcher job and hack up the power from the sata to usb connectors.

Sucks to hear about your loss, I've recently lost my proxmox setup and migrated everything to Nixos. My install threw a wobbly, terminal was cooked, could only ssh into some containers so I wiped the install and migrated.

In my proxmox setup I found it easier to mount the drives as lvm to the host proxmox machine and pass them through to lxc via bind-mounts rather than adding another layer of shares / overheads.

[–] pyrosis 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Just a little heads up about multiple USB drives. They kinda suck sharing on the hub and raids tend to destroy them because of the way they "share" bandwidth on the hub.

To avoid this problem one solution is a USBc to SATA enclosure. The idea being the enclosure having a SATA controller and a few SATA ports you can plug in a few drives. You would be avoiding the multi USB port "sharing" issue. The enclosure would have all the usb hub bandwidth and the hub wouldn't be switching around between ports.

I learned this little bit of info messing with zfs and a few different types of flash media. In the end the most stable connection less prone to error was a single USB connection. However, it didn't matter if it was a single drive or a multi drive enclosure.

Today I wouldn't recommend doing this at all. However if you are going to. Have a look at how USB port sharing on a usb hub works and how that can wreck a raid system over time.

Edit Spelling

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Funnily enough I was looking at these usb Sata cases yesterday, but I was expecting them to be cheaper then they are (I'm a Yorkshireman and we're notorious for not liking spending money).

As to your point (which I will look into) are you talking about an actual external Hub here or the USB in my machine? I ask because I have 5 usb 3.0 ports on the machine and do not actually use an external hub, but when you use the word "hub" you could also be referring to the USB controller on the machine.

Also I haven't dabbled with RAID yet but I had considered it, so this may sway me to invest some money before considering it properly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I don't think those USB cases are priced realistically at all. For what they're asking I may as well just buy hardware to build a NAS box.

[–] pyrosis 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well specifically I'm referring to the internal hub on your system and how it shares port bandwidth. It doesn't really matter for things like a mouse or keyboard. However, when you are talking like permanent flash disks it's worth investigating how the bandwidth is shared between ports. Specifically the switching back and forth between the storage devices. Some filesystems handle this better than others.

I was was also referring to a way I found that stabilizes the connection. That being a USB to SATA controller via like one port. That way that port tends to take advantage of all the bandwidth without switching around.

Also keep in mind USB flash media is notorious for wear compared to something like nvme/msata disks.

It's possible to combat writes on flash media by utilizing things like ram disks in Linux. Basically migrating write heavy locations like temp and logs to the ram disk. Though you need to consider that restarting wipes those locations because they are living in ram now. Some operating systems do this automatically like opnsense with a check mark.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Well I'll keep it in mind for if I get any issues but it seems to be running ok ATM with USB ports passed through to OMV and then CIFS back to Proxmox so I can save backups.

As it is, at most 2 drives will be in use at a time with the third as a backup drive doing rsync at night (still to set up).

I'm not using flash storage. These are proper spinning Hard Drives with a usb 3 cable (and a power cable) to the host.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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