In today’s digital age, data storage has become an essential part of daily life—whether it’s for backing up family photos, managing large media collections, or handling more advanced home lab setups. Like many of you, I found myself searching for a reliable, scalable, and high-speed storage solution that would allow me to safely store data without breaking the bank. After going through numerous consumer-grade NAS options, I decided to take a DIY route, leveraging my IT background to create a custom storage solution at home.
The Setup
I started with what I had lying around—a trusty HP laptop running the latest Ubuntu 24. This serves as the base of my experiment. The laptop is connected to a single 6TB hard drive, which I’ve shared over Samba for ease of access within my local network. So far, the performance has been solid, but I wanted to go bigger—much bigger.
Luckily, I have a few 6TB server-grade hard drives on hand. My goal is to use four of them in a direct-attached storage (DAS) setup connected to the laptop via a Type-C Thunderbolt port. The idea here is to take advantage of Thunderbolt’s high-speed data transmission capabilities, which will allow this humble setup to scale significantly in terms of storage capacity and speed.
Why DIY?
Many would argue that off-the-shelf NAS solutions are convenient and come with user-friendly interfaces, but there are some key benefits to building your own storage system:
• Customisability: You have full control over the software stack, file systems, and network configurations.
• Scalability: Expanding storage is as simple as adding more drives.
• Cost-Efficiency: By using existing hardware and repurposing server-grade drives, you can achieve high-end performance without the premium price tag.
The Hardware and Storage Design
• 💻 Laptop: HP running Ubuntu 24 with Core i7, 16GB of RAM and 520GB SSD.
• 🫙 Drives: 4x 6TB server-grade HDDs (total 24TB).
• 🔌 Connection: Type-C Thunderbolt for high-speed data transfer.
• Storage Software: I’m currently exploring different software solutions to manage the drives and ensure redundancy. Some of the top contenders are ZFS for its scalability and Btrfs for snapshot capabilities.
Future Expansion: piKVM for Remote Management
As I continue to build out this storage solution, remote management will be a key factor for convenience. In the future, I plan to implement a piKVM to manage the laptop remotely. For those unfamiliar, piKVM is a fantastic open-source hardware project that allows you to control machines over the network as if you were sitting right in front of them. Until I get that up and running, I’m managing the system through either a direct SSH session or, when needed, a VNC connection for more visual tasks.
Your Thoughts?
This is just the beginning of my journey toward a scalable home storage solution. I’m excited to see where it leads, but I would love to hear from you! Have you attempted something similar? Any tips, suggestions, or recommendations are welcome.
Please leave your feedback in the comments— I look forward to your thoughts and insights!
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