About thirteen years ago, I bought a Synology NAS. It was one of those white boxes that promised to just work. And it did — right up until it didn’t. One day it made a sound best described as a mechanical cough, and just like that, my centralized storage became a very expensive paperweight.
Fast forward to early 2026. Multiple devices. Multiple people in the house. Google Drive handling documents fine, but media? That was a different story. I wanted movies and shows on the TVs without keeping my main PC running 24/7 like some kind of space heater with a graphics card.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I browsed NAS units.
The Price Tag That Made Me Laugh (Then Cry)
Here’s the thing about consumer NAS pricing in 2026: it’s astronomical. And I’m not talking about the enterprise gear. I’m talking about the "entry-level" 2-bay units that cost more than my first car, and that’s before you add drives. You’re paying a massive premium for:
- A mobile CPU from 2019
- 2GB of soldered RAM (upgradeable? laughs in proprietary)
- An OS that’s great until you want to run something it doesn’t officially support
- The privilege of buying their branded drives at a markup
For a quarter of that price, I could buy a refurbished office PC with an i5-6500, 32GB DDR4, and room for actual drives. It came with a 256GB SSD that I swapped for a 1TB SSD I’d been using as portable storage. A real computer. One that runs Docker. One that runs VMs. One that doesn’t treat "running a container" as a premium feature.
That’s when I encountered the word "homelab."
Down the Rabbit Hole
I bought the refurbished PC (an HP G3, since you asked). I bought drives. I learned about Proxmox VE — which, by the way, is free despite what the pricing page tries to imply. I installed it. I created three VMs:
- Debian + Docker + Portainer — for media stack and "future services" (spoiler: there are always future services)
- Debian + Webmin + Samba — because I couldn’t find NAS software that didn’t make me want to scream
- Home Assistant — to replace the HA instance running on a laptop in a closet
Google Search documented my struggles and even ChatGPT witnessed me bitchin’ about it. There’s a conversation titled "Homelab Setup Advice" from April 7th. Another called "Homelab Build Guide" from April 8th. There’s one literally titled "this has become a nightmare" — that was the Samba permissions episode. We’ll get to that.
The Plot Twist: A Second Node
About two weeks in, my main PC died. In the repair process, I upgraded a few things and realized I had enough spare parts to build a second machine. Initially I’d planned to sell it. Then I checked used prices and had a long conversation with an AI about whether a Ryzen 5600 + GTX 1060 + 32GB RAM was worth keeping for "local AI experiments".
Spoiler: I kept it.
Now I had two nodes:
| Node | Specs | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Infra Node (the refurbished HP G3) | i5-6500, 32GB DDR4, 1TB SSD + 6TB RAID | NAS, daily cloud services, Home Assistant, infrastructure |
| Smart Node (the Frankenstein build) | Ryzen 5 5600, GTX 1060 OC, 32GB DDR4, 1TB SSD | Local AI, media transcoding, heavy compute |
The media stack migrated to Smart Node. Infra Node stayed… well, infra. The naming convention stuck because "server-1" and "server-2" is how you get confused at 2 AM.
The NAS Software That Wasn’t
Here’s a hot take: there is no good NAS software for people who want control without a PhD in storage.
-
TrueNAS SCALE — I considered it, but the architecture just didn’t fit. I already had ZFS running on the Proxmox host (
/tank). Running TrueNAS as a VM on top of that meant ZFS on top of ZFS — double ARC caching, wasted RAM, a second layer of abstraction that would hurt I/O performance, and more complexity for zero gain. The UI is beautiful, but the architecture just didn’t fit my setup. -
OpenMediaVault — Debian-based, familiar, but ZFS isn’t first-class — it’s an optional plugin that never worked reliably for me. The plugin ecosystem feels abandoned. I ended up on plain Debian + Webmin to manage Samba shares instead.
-
Unraid — The Docker experience is genuinely excellent. The "parity drive" model is flexible. Also: it’s proprietary, paid, and the community treats questioning the license like you insulted their mother.
-
CasaOS / Portainer / custom Docker — Now you’re just running a server with extra steps.
I went with Debian + Samba + ZFS on the Proxmox host. Why? Because I know Linux. Because ZFS gives me snapshots, checksumming, and send/receive for backups. Because Samba just works once you stop fighting permission models.
That last part? Took me three days. The sambashare group. Matching GIDs across Proxmox host, Samba VM, and Docker VM. chmod 2775 so new files inherit the group. The conversation where I asked "does using the users group create security issues?" and got the answer "Yes — slightly. But acceptable for a home lab."
Then I exposed services via Cloudflare Tunnels and the answer changed to "No, don’t use users group anymore." Security is a moving target.
The ZFS Episode
I had a 2TB drive with an exFAT partition, plus I bought two more 2TB drives. "Can I use these together?" I asked.
"exFAT is the wrong filesystem for a server. It works, but it’s fragile and missing critical features."
Right. So I reformatted the exFAT drive and added the two new drives. Created a ZFS pool on the Proxmox host (/tank) with all three 2TB drives in a RAID-Z. Datasets for data, media, services, temp. Passed them via VirtIO-FS to VMs. Mounted in /etc/fstab. Wrestled with mp0 bind mounts for a while, but they’re not working for QEMU VMs (only LXC containers — why didn’t anyone say that in the docs?). Eventually passed the whole disk to the VM via VirtIO-SCSI.
It works now. Mostly. Sometimes I still check zpool status compulsively.
The Cloud Comparison
So what did this cost vs. cloud?
Homelab hardware costs (one-time):
- Infra Node (refurbished HP G3): ~€200
- 2× 2TB HDDs for ZFS pool (added to existing 2TB drive): ~€180
- Smart Node parts (Ryzen 5600, GTX 1060, mobo, RAM, SSD): ~€80
- Total hardware: ~€460
Recurring costs:
- Plex Pass: €6/month (GPU transcoding + family sharing)
- Electricity: ~€50/yr
Cloud subscriptions I replaced:
- 2× Netflix: €14/month each = €28/month
- Amazon Prime: ~€4/month
- Spotify: ~€11/month
- Audible: ~€18/month
- Google One (3TB): €3/month
- Total cloud: ~€61/month = €732/yr
Break-even: ~7 months. After that, the hardware is paid off and you’re saving ~€61/month forever.
But the spreadsheet misses the point.
What You Actually Get
Control. Not the marketing kind. The real kind.
- My media library plays on multiple TVs in multiple homes (plus phone, laptop, PC — I’m actually watching something right now). Plex with Plex Pass for GPU transcoding + family sharing. Direct Play when possible, GPU transcoding when needed.
- My documents sync via Nextcloud + Collabora, hosted on my drives, zero outside access.
- My Home Assistant controls my apartment. No cloud dependency. Local automations run in milliseconds.
- On the Smart Node: Local LLMs (Hermes, Open WebUI), Wyoming protocol for HA voice, qBittorrent, Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr, Prowlarr, Bazarr.
- On the Infra Node: AdGuard (DHCP, DNS rewrites, ad filtering), Docmost (self-hosted Confluence), Immich (photo cloud), n8n (automations), Pinchflat (YouTube favorites downloader), Twingate adapter (remote access to entire infrastructure).
- Remote access through Twingate (zero open ports). Media accessible remotely through Plex.
- I experiment. I break things. I fix them. I learn how storage actually works, not how a vendor’s abstraction layer presents it.
The Trade-offs (Because Engineering Is Trade-offs)
| What I Gained | What I Lost |
|---|---|
| Minimal recurring costs | Zero vendor SLAs |
| Complete data sovereignty | Vendor safety net |
| Complete responsibility | Someone else to blame |
| Skills that transfer to work | Time. So much time. |
| Hardware that does exactly what I want | Hardware that fails at 3 AM |
| No "this feature requires Plus plan" | No "click here to fix it" button |
Was It Worth It?
Financially? Yes, after 7 months. The hardware paid for itself by replacing ~€61/month in cloud subscriptions.
Technically? Absolutely. The skills — Proxmox, ZFS, Docker networking, reverse proxies, Certificate management, Linux permissions, hardware passthrough — these aren’t "homelab skills." They’re infrastructure skills. The same ones that run production systems, just at smaller scale and with better hardware-to-cost ratio.
Personally? It’s been frustrating, educational, occasionally infuriating, and deeply satisfying. There’s a specific joy in typing plex.local on your TV remote and having it just work, knowing you built the entire chain from disk platter to DNS entry.