Add Storage Hard Drive Physical - Usb Box
Adding a physical USB box to Proxmox VE allows you to quickly expand your storage capacity using a physical hard drive or external hard drive. This solution is especially useful for home lab users or test systems that need more space to store virtual machines, ISOs, and backups. In this article, you will be guided in detail on how to identify the hard drive, mount it manually, and configure it as storage in Proxmox. In addition, the guide also shows how to check the partition, assign access rights, and handle errors when the USB box does not recognize itself. This method does not require additional plugin installation, but only uses the available tools in the Proxmox web interface. Once completed, you can easily manage the external hard drive as an internal storage. This is a simple, economical, and effective way to expand the storage capacity on Proxmox VE.
Lab: Attach the USB or USB box to the Proxmox host server for storage backup or migration
Step 1: Identify the USB device name and format it to ext4
Plug the USB into the Proxmox machine and run the command:
lsblk
usb: sdb
Step 2: Format the hard drive box
Format the USB box to a format like ext4 or xfs for stable use in the Proxmox/Linux environment.
in this demo is showing as sdb
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
Step 3: Create a permanent mount directory
Mount the usb/external hard drive to a permanent directory, for example: usb-backup
Create a folder
mkdir -p /mnt/usb-backup
Step 4:Mount automatic
Write the auto mount information to /etc/fstab
First, get the UUID of the drive:
blkid /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1: UUID=”55f65063-87f1-46a4-9b1d-998d2a51d477″ BLOCK_SIZE=”4096″ TYPE=”ext4″
Add line in /etc/fstab (use nano or vim):
nano /etc/fstab
UUID=55f65063-87f1-46a4-9b1d-998d2a51d477 /mnt/usb-backup ext4 defaults,nofail 0 0
Then the behavior will be as follows:
• If USB is mounted at boot → will mount automatically
• If not mounted → the system will still boot normally
Replace ext4 if other file system, for example ntfs or exfat.
Then mount:
systemctl daemon-reload
mount -a
Check again
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Step 5: Add to Proxmox GUI
• Go to Datacenter > Storage > Add > Directory
• Select:
o ID: usb-backup
o Directory: /mnt/usb-backup
o Content: select the type you want to use (ISO, Disk Image, Backup, etc.)
o Enable ✅
• Click Add