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, 16GB DDR4, and room for actual drives. 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 (a Dell OptiPlex 7050 SFF, 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:
- 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
The struggles are documented in my ChatGPT history. There’s a conversation titled "Homelab Setup Advice" from April 17th. Another called "Homelab Build Guide" from April 18th. 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. Then I 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 OptiPlex) | i5-6500, 15GB 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 — ZFS is great until you need to expand a RAID-Z pool. Then you learn the phrase "you can’t just add a drive." The UI is beautiful. The learning curve is a wall.
- OpenMediaVault — Debian-based, familiar, but the plugin ecosystem feels abandoned. Webmin integration is… an experience.
- 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. "Can I use this?" I asked.
"exFAT is the wrong filesystem for a server. It works, but it’s fragile and missing critical features."
Right. So I reformatted. Created a ZFS pool on the Proxmox host (/tank). Datasets for data, media, services, temp. Passed them via VirtIO-FS to VMs. Mounted in /etc/fstab. Wrestled with mp0 bind mounts 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?
| Item | Cloud (Annual) | Homelab (One-time) |
|---|---|---|
| 6TB storage (Google One) | ~€300/yr | €180 (2× 6TB HDD) |
| 2TB media + backup (Dropbox) | ~€120/yr | Included above |
| Plex Pass (for HW transcoding) | €120/yr lifetime | €0 (Jellyfin + Direct Play) |
| Compute (GitHub Actions, etc.) | Variable | Already paid for |
| Total Year 1 | ~€540+ | ~€600 (hardware) |
| Year 2+ | ~€540/yr | €0 (power + ~€50/yr) |
Break-even: ~14 months. After that, it’s "free" — if you don’t count electricity, time, and the occasional 3 AM "why is the array degraded" panic.
But the spreadsheet misses the point.
What You Actually Get
Control. Not the marketing kind. The real kind.
- My media library plays on my Philips TV via Jellyfin. No transcoding. No Plex Pass. Direct Play all the way.
- My documents sync via Nextcloud (added later) — end-to-end encrypted, on my drives.
- My Home Assistant controls both houses. No cloud dependency. Local automations run in milliseconds.
- I run local LLMs on Smart Node. Qwen3:32B. Gemma 4. No API keys. No rate limits. No data leaving my network.
- 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 |
|---|---|
| Zero recurring costs | Zero vendor SLAs |
| Complete data sovereignty | Complete responsibility |
| Learning that transfers 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 year two.
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 jellyfin.local on your TV remote and having it just work, knowing you built the entire chain from disk platter to DNS entry.
Next week: "Proxmox + ZFS: The Foundation I Wish I’d Started With" — where we talk about dataset design, snapshot strategies, and why ashift=12 matters more than you think.
Currently running: Infra Node (Proxmox 8.2, ZFS 2.2) + Smart Node (Debian 12, Docker, Ollama, Hermes Agent). Zero cloud subscriptions. One very confused cat who keeps sleeping on the OptiPlex.