local-path-provisioner VS csi-driver-nfs

Deploy local-path-provisioner storage class but it does not support readwritemany so for high availability of your Kubernetes cluster better to use longhorn

I use this one. I'm waiting for the day it's combined with syncthing to sync across all nodes. https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner

So I have this single node k3s cluster. k3s uses local-path (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner) as default SC that allows one to create dynamic volumes using nodes local storage.

Just create 1 single partition and format it with whatevery filesystem you like. And then use ranchers local-path-provisioner which will create a folder per PV (k3s has this integrated by default).

Tinkering locally with local path provisioner (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner), I find that I can delete and re-create the pod, and the data persists on disk. However, if I delete the PVC, when I recreate the PVC, a new directory on disk is created.

It is better to use https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner (or similar) for this case which will do PVC on local directories because manually linking PV<>PVC will not work.

Since you only have one physical node anyway, I would just make the cluster a single-node cluster (1 VM) and use local storage on that VM. I’m biased though because this is what I do (I run K3s and use local path provisioner).

Rancher's Local Path Provisioner - From reading, seems to just use HostPath or Local PVs under the hood, but adds dynamic provisoning

With any of those tools, you'd implement a network storage on top of a network storage. I would go with mouting few volumes per node +local storage like (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner).

Using nfs-subdir-external-provisioner instead of csi-driver-nfs

Probably you are looking for dynamic volume provisioning. Using this option you only need to create a persistent volume claim. The storage designed to your container. Instead of first creating a persistent volume and binding it to a pvc. Nowadays is common to use plugins CSI plugins for different storages backends. This repository contains some examples on how to mounts the NFS server on kubernetes and also create storage classes, and the CSI installation. It is worth to read the documentation due to the many concepts involved and details of importance like reclamation polices.

Depending on the use case, nfs could be a solution also. I have a k3s cluster on a nuc, and it works correctly https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-nfs

For nfs with k8s, you could use this https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-nfs