I have spent the last couple of weeks getting my small used PC into my Proxmox server and it’s going great! …Until I quickly ran into the 256GB SSD size limit of the included drive. So I have ordered a much larger (2tb) one so I can expand much more.

Ideally, I would like to make an exact clone of what I have now just on my bigger SSD to avoid having to rebuild my VMs

One issue is that the computer has room for one drive only. I was hoping to get an exact clone to a USB drive then clone to the new drive once replaced with the new one.

Any suggestions or tips would be appreciated, thank you.

EDIT: Took another look in the guts of my system managed to get another 2tb SSD in there.

Disconnected cd drive and got a power splitter and boom. Could probably get another one even with another splitter as it’s got a 3rd sata port.

  • @corrodedEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    If it’s really impossible to add an extra drive, are you able to attach an external drive or map a networked drive that has space for your VMs and LXCs?

    In your situation, what I would probably do is back up all my VMs to my NAS, replace the hard drive in my Proxmox hypervisor, re-install a fresh copy of Proxmox on the new drive, and restore the VMs back to my new Proxmox installation. If you don’t have a NAS, you could do this with a USB-attached hard drive, too.

    Ideally, though, you should have separate drives for your Proxmox boot drive and your VMs. Even if you’re using a SFF PC that doesn’t have an extra drive bay, could you double-sided-tape a SSD to the bottom of the case and use this as your storage drive? I’ve certainly done it before.

    • @AverageGoobOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I spent 100$ on a cheap e-waste bound Dell. All proprietary parts so the power supply didn’t have any extra power cables I could see for another drive.

      With that being said I’ll take another look just to make sure. As a lot of other people have said a second drive for holding the data would for sure be ideal.

      I do have my own normal.windows PC that I could just dump it all onto. My Proxmox install I am not worried about its really just my one VM that I have spent weeks on now getting my various services setup on.

      Can the VMs be moved separately? If so, that would make this a lot easier to just move them to a USB and install the new drive.