Hey all, I’m looking to begin expanding my storage in my homelab, and I want to have somewhere in the range of 16-32TB redundant storage. I didn’t realize that, when buying a NAS from a company like Synology, you’re also paying for their software.
I’m perfectly comfortable running RAID/UNRAID or something like TrueNAS to serve out my NAS storage. So what options does that leave me with? What are the benefits of a RAID enclosure? They certainly seem to be cheaper options than a pre-built NAS, which is certainly appealing. What NAS storage solution do you use?
Get an ATX case with lots of drive bays, a SAS HBA (and SAS expander if you want lots of drives), cheap mobo/CPU/RAM and OS of your choice. Spin it up, play with it, settle on an OS you like, and upgrade components as needed.