Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

Physical drive failure

This failure occurs when the physical drive itself becomes completely unusable or defective. In this scenario, the only option is to replace the damaged drive with a new one and install clean Proxmox VE on it. One way to prevent downtime due to physical drive failure is to use two physical drives for the OS in mirror mode. During Proxmox installation, we can select the Advanced option to create a ZFS mirror on two physical drives. This way when one drive becomes physically damaged, it does not cause any downtime since there is a second drive with all of the OS files. This same RAID-level redundancy can be achieved using a RAID card and by creating Raid 1 on two physical drives.