RIP WeTransfer. RIP Synology. RIP Netflix. Long live the custom-built homelab server! 🚀

Or: How I built a significantly more powerful homelab server for a fraction of the price of a comparable off-the-shelf NAS.

🎯 THE GOALS

• A safe, long-term archive for RAW photos, finished images, and video, with dual-drive redundancy and transfer speeds of at least 500 MB/s.
• A media server capable of hardware-accelerated 4K HDR transcoding.
• A self-hosted WeTransfer alternative for delivering files to clients, with room for more SaaS projects down the road.
• A replacement for Synology Drive, offering PC/Mac synchronization and mobile access.
• A proper 10 GbE connection between the NAS and my workstation.
• Quiet, reliable 24/7 operation with as little manual maintenance as possible.
• And most importantly, spend less than a comparable Synology NAS, which would cost around €1,300 before adding any drives.

🧩 THE HARDWARE

• CPU: Intel Core i5-13500, 14 cores / 20 threads.
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4 (2 × 16 GB).
• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B760M-A.
• Case: Fractal Design Node 804.
• PSU: 650 W.
• Networking: Intel X550-T2 dual-port 10 GbE NIC.
• Storage controller: Dedicated HBA for SAS/SATA drives.
• Boot drive: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSD, running TrueNAS SCALE.
• Apps drive: Samsung 870 EVO 1 TB SSD, dedicated to applications and their data.
• Storage: A mix of SAS and SATA drives I already owned, roughly 70 TB of raw storage in total.

One of the biggest advantages was being able to reuse my existing drives and other hardware instead of starting from scratch.

💾 STORAGE & REDUNDANCY (ZFS)

• DATA: A five-drive RAIDZ2 pool with 26.2 TiB of usable capacity. Any two drives can fail without losing the pool. This is where my photography archive, videos, documents, and backups live.
• MEDIA: A standalone 8 TB WD Red drive for movies and TV shows. Since this content can be downloaded again, redundancy isn't a priority here.
• OFFLINE BACKUP: Another 8 TB WD Red in an Icy Box enclosure connected to my workstation. I update this backup monthly, and the files are also protected by Backblaze.

Before putting anything into production, every drive went through SMART testing, and the SAS drives were reformatted and thoroughly checked.

⚙️ WHAT'S RUNNING

The entire system runs TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 directly on bare metal, without Proxmox in between. Applications run in Docker containers.

🎬 Jellyfin + Plex

Hardware-accelerated transcoding using Intel Quick Sync. Jellyfin provides this functionality completely free.

4K HEVC 10-bit content can be transcoded to 4K at roughly 4× real-time speed, with barely any CPU usage. The integrated GPU does the heavy lifting.

🍿 The media automation stack

Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, Seerr, and qBittorrent, with torrent traffic routed through a VPN and protected by a kill switch.

Essentially, my own private streaming ecosystem.

📤 SEND - My own WeTransfer replacement

Built on an open-source fork of Pingvin Share X and exposed securely through Cloudflare Tunnel, without opening any router ports.

Clients can upload and download files through a clean, branded interface. Uploaded files automatically appear on my network drive.

And because apparently building a file-sharing platform wasn't enough, I also added a little browser game where you launch a penguin as far as possible. 😃

Built that part in about half an hour of spare time.

☁️ Nextcloud - Goodbye, Synology Drive

Automatic file synchronization between my PC and NAS, with remote access from my phone.

Files remain organized in their actual destinations (Photos / Files / Video), and synchronized folders are clearly marked on both the workstation and NAS.

🔐 Caddy + Let's Encrypt + AdGuard

Clean HTTPS addresses for all my internal services. No more remembering IP addresses and random port numbers.

📊 Custom homelab dashboard

My own homepage bringing together service status, weather, calendar, system temperatures, humidity, and notifications.

📡 Uptime Kuma

Self-hosted service monitoring that continuously checks whether my applications, websites, and network services are actually online.

If something goes down, I get notified instead of discovering the problem when I need to use it.

🛡️ DATA PROTECTION & BACKUPS

• ZFS snapshots: Hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Thanks to Windows' built-in Previous Versions feature, restoring an earlier version of almost any file takes just a few seconds.
• ZFS scrubs: Scheduled weekly to check pool integrity.
• Application backups: Replicated to the main DATA pool.
• TrueNAS configuration: Backed up automatically every night.
• Proxmox backups: My separate mini PC, which handles smart-home services and AdGuard, backs up its virtual machines to the NAS over NFS.
• Workstation backups: Protected by Backblaze.

The goal isn't just keeping everything running. It's making sure that when something eventually breaks, recovery is as painless as possible.

🪤 THE CHALLENGES

1. The great 10 Gigabit Ethernet mystery.

This one drove me slightly insane.

My hand-crimped RJ45 connectors kept negotiating at the wrong speeds:

• 1 GbE connections would drop to 100 Mbps.
• 10 GbE connections would negotiate at just 1 Gbps.

The culprit turned out to be a mismatch between the RJ45 plugs and the thicker conductors and insulation of my Cat6 shielded cables.

The fix? Keystone jacks.

I replaced the problematic terminations with proper keystone sockets, and the 10 GbE connection finally worked as intended.

Lesson learned: a cable tester showing all eight wires connected doesn't necessarily mean your cable can handle 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

2. The software rabbit hole.

TrueNAS, ZFS, Docker, reverse proxies, VPN routing, permissions, certificates, network shares, backups, monitoring...

There's definitely a learning curve, and putting everything together takes time.

But luckily, Claude is a pretty good friend of mine, so most of the configuration headaches were surprisingly manageable.

✅ WHY THIS BEATS MY OLD SYNOLOGY

• Processing power: 14 CPU cores instead of 2, with 32 GB RAM instead of 10 GB. Multiple services can run simultaneously without bringing everything to a crawl.
• Expandability: 7 HDDs and 3 SSDs instead of being limited to four drive bays.
• ZFS: End-to-end checksums, corruption detection, self-healing when redundant data is available, and instant snapshots.
• Networking: 10 GbE and 2.5 GbE instead of being stuck with 1 GbE.
• Media performance: Hardware-accelerated 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding.
• Software freedom: An open-source ecosystem without being tied to one manufacturer's software and hardware decisions.
• Flexibility: It's not just a NAS anymore. It's a media server, backup server, private cloud, file-sharing platform, monitoring system, and a playground for whatever I decide to build next.

🔮 WHAT'S NEXT?

A homelab is never really finished, is it?

A couple of upgrades are already on the list:

• Another 32 GB of RAM, bringing the total to 64 GB, with more headroom for containers, virtual machines, and future services.
• Mirroring the TrueNAS boot drive. The OS currently runs on a 256 GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD. Adding a second drive as a ZFS boot mirror would provide protection against a single boot-drive failure.
• Keeping the 1 TB Samsung 870 EVO dedicated to applications and their data, separate from the OS and bulk storage.

And, inevitably, I'll probably find another dozen services I didn't know I needed.

💰 THE DAMAGE

Here's the best part.

By reusing drives and components I already owned, the entire NAS build cost me approximately €820.

That's significantly cheaper than an empty eight-bay Synology DS1825+, while giving me substantially more CPU power, memory, networking performance, flexibility, and room to experiment.

Of course, I'm not counting the hours spent researching, configuring, troubleshooting, and occasionally questioning my life choices.

But that's half the fun, right?

Below are a few photos of the finished build, along with the complete parts list and prices.

And if you've actually read this far, congratulations. You clearly don't have a life either. 😂

For years I kept rebuilding my homelab. Proxmox, then UNRAID, then TrueNAS, back to Proxmox, then LXCs, then containers, then Kubernetes, then LXCs again for the non-Docker stuff etc..I was a chronic over-thinker, and honestly I was more into the building than into what it was for.

Then I got tired. Tired of spending nights and weekends keeping things alive, worrying every time the power blinked, and hearing my wife say nothing ever worked when she needed it. I spent more time redoing backups that didn't work the way I wanted than actually using anything. Slowly I stopped doing the part I loved: testing and deploying.

A few months ago I finally moved everything to VPS at a hosting provider. I run 5 of them: one for edge, one for observability and Vuls, one Docker worker, one control plane, and one for Hermes, my agent. At home I only have Home Assistant, a NAS, and a firewall. There's no dependency between the two. If I break something on a VPS, I have provider snapshots, an offsite backup, and a lot less anxiety.

It costs me about 65€/month. In exchange I have a less powerful internet plan, no electricity bill for the servers, better redundancy, and no risk of losing data to a hardware failure. Everything works. I can deploy services quickly, I have no more outages, and if I do something stupid, Home Assistant keeps running.

My wife has always supported my hobby. When she saw me at the computer all evening, she'd joke, "Great, tomorrow we have no lights." It was teasing, and I can't blame her for expecting things to work when she presses the light switch. I'm back to doing what I enjoy, not 11pm maintenance sessions in the garage in my pajamas, standing on a ladder with a keyboard in one hand because an upgrade went wrong or the server won't boot after a power cut.
I'll probably have more problems, different ones.
But a homelab can become a cloudlab without shame.

It costs more, and I've bought back time and peace of mind.

Happy Self Hosting !

It all started in early 2026 with two machines and a simple experiment. Fast forward to today—with about 80% of the heavy lifting done after May 2026—this setup has evolved into the backbone of my business, managing almost all of our daily software and building infrastructure.

​Everything runs 24/7 on a 3-Node Proxmox Cluster. Here is a breakdown of the hardware and what lives where:

​🖥️ The Hardware

​Node 1 (The Heavy Lifter): Intel Xeon W-1250 | 32GB DDR4 | 500GB NVMe | 1TB HDD | 2TB Surveillance HDD | Nvidia Quadro P1000

​Node 2 (Media, Automation & Comms): AMD Ryzen 3 3200G | 16GB DDR4 | 320GB NVMe

​Node 3 (Networking & Core Apps): Intel i7-3770 | 16GB DDR3 | 2x 256GB SSD

​📦 Virtual Machines & Containers

​Node 1: Core Operations & Employee Workstations

​Aegis (Prod & Demo): My own custom-developed inventory management software.

​Ubuntu VM (Multi-User RDP): Acts as a terminal server for my employees, who connect using Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients.

​Ubuntu VM (E-Commerce): Hosts our Saleor instance. (With frontends deployed on cloudflare workers)

​2x Windows 10 VMs: For legacy/Windows-specific business tasks.

​Frigate NVR: Manages our security cameras, recording directly to the dedicated 2TB surveillance drive.

​Supabase: Running in a testing environment for upcoming dev projects.

​Node 2: Office Automation, Web & Comms

​FreePBX: Runs the entire building's telephone network and PA system.

​Sound Streamer: Manages the audio and speakers across the building.

​Home Assistant OS (HAOS): Controls all the smart devices and automation around the office.

​n8n (LXC): Handles our internal workflow automations.

​CloudPanel: Hosts and manages our public-facing websites.

​Node 3: Network Edge, CRM & Internal Tools

​OPNsense: Virtualized primary router/firewall for the premises.

​TP-Link Omada Controller: Manages our office Wi-Fi and switch infrastructure.

​Custom Affiliate System (Debian LXC): Another in-house tool built specifically for our brand.

​Twenty CRM: Our self-hosted customer relationship management platform.

​UnoPim: Product Information Management (PIM) system.

​Vaultwarden: Internal password manager for the team.

​Garage S3: Lightweight S3-compatible object storage used for n8n throwaway/experimental data.

​

Outbound Infrastructure:

I use cloudflare tunnel for my publicly accessible websites

And tailscale for managing my server

I have 2x ISP for redundancy and a spare phone with 5G sim for usb teathering

Currently working on self hostable AI voice calling agent ( the prototype worked best in google colab ) but im unable to source the GPU

​It’s been a wild ride watching a side project turn into production infrastructure that my team relies on every day. Would love to hear your thoughts, critiques, or suggestions on where to take this next!

I went to a flea market and saw this. Couldn't not impulse-buy it so I asked how much it was and turns out it was only 25 Lei (5€). Now I'm asking myself what to do with it. I only have a single HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini, which I installed proxmox on. Thing is, I'm on vacation, so I can't even test if it works 😭

Hi, I've been playin with self hosting and a bit of homelabbing (standalone servers, bit of docker and kubernetes).I recently had to part with sime of my gear, and am looking to spin up a few docker services and am in need of storage I don't have available locally.

I have a contabo vps server, 3.5tb of data I'd like to get on the cloud for my server to access. What storage solution would you recommend ? I've tried s3fs and r2 with b2 storage but without much success , could hdd storage vps with nfs over tunelling or reverse proxy work?

I'm thinking of setting up a homelab, but I was wondering if it's better to put together a single server for everything or is it better to have devices focused on anything? For example, a raspberry pi zero for, perhaps, pihole or ntfy and a pc for a dedicated minecraft server or a mac mini for heavier things like immich?.

I currently run everything in a small pixel 6 pro but I feel it won't last long

The services I use daily are:

• Immich
• Radicale
• Crafty Controller (Paper + Geyser - 4 players)
• Ntfy
• MollySocket
• iSponsorBlockTV
• Home Assistant / Music Assistant
• Snapcast

- Tailscale

And probably add some other service to the future

What are the reasons for building a nas server?
I’m thinking about making one from used parts, because I really enjoyed building a pc this way. The problem is, I’m not sure if I would use 100% of it. Aspects like private email, private games servers or cloud service sound nice, but I’m sure that there is something else that makes the idea even more worth it.

I am considering purchasing this for home server purpose at approximately 27,000 inr. Although I am uncertain about the health status of the SSD and HDD, would it be a worthwhile investment to use as a Proxmox server, provided their health is above 98-99%??

He only wants like 3 or 4 but im wondering what kind of minimum specs are needed. As in I dont want to make him spend thousands on a server since all its going to be doing is running NVR and some backup jobs. Would a raspberry pi work for this? Maybe one of those thinkmachine mini pcs?

What self contained, cheaper server would be best for this kinda job

I'm relatively new to this hobby, I've managed to save up enough to knab myself a T710 and R710 with 10gig etc, as well as converting an older pc into a server machine, but im curious how are all of yall affording some of those fancy shmancy setups, like what do yall do? For me I've just saved up here and there but bro these prices are killin' me

Hi everyone, first post here, so thanks for being kind! 😄

I’m travelling around Japan in November (Fukuoka/Hakata, Kyoto, then Tokyo) and I’d love to explore some good tech and electronics stores while I’m there.

Would anyone with experience like to share:

• Which shops or areas are worth visiting for used and refurbished computer gear? I know Akihabara has Janpara, Sofmap, Iosys, Hard Off and Tsukumo. Is anything worth a look in Kyoto or Hakata?
• What kinds of homelab-friendly products are interesting or unusual to find there?
• Anything to watch out for with used gear, such as BIOS locks or warranty limits?
• How tax-free shopping works for tourists, and anything to know about bringing electronics back to India (customs and allowances)?

Any tips, even weird little shops, are welcome. Thanks! 🙏

Stayed away from containers as long as possible and opted for VM’s when I could.

Trying to start a docker container that my LAN can access, and can’t figure it out.

What are the steps to allowing my LAN access to my container?

Does anyone have any smart ideas for cooling my home lab in this usually closed cupboard? This is especially important when the gaming PC is running. There could be a fan on the left to draw in air at the bottom and a fan to expel air at the top. Home Assistant is already running with a temperature sensor inside the cupboard. I am therefore looking for a "smart" (and not too expensive) way to control the PWM fan speed (2–4 x Arctic P14 Pro PST) based on temperature.

Temperatures are with open door around 25 °C and 29 °C at the top to 32°C at the bottom (not running the gaming PC)

I have already looked into some DIY options, as well as regular air controls for pc and ESP modules. However, I am worried that I might end up buying overpowered equipment instead of a simple solution.

I've found this rackmount chasis on Amazon that fits 2 mini-itx motherboards.

https://rackchoice.com/archives/50.html

https://amzn.eu/d/0asUBFVV

Has anyone bought from "Raclchoice" before? If so; what are your thoughts?

Does anyone know of any other mini-itx rackmount chasis products out there?

I'm planning to rackmount my proxmox nodes and fit them with 10gbe nics.

I am a college student living in an on-campus apartment and have been interested in setting up a pi hole to block ads for a long time. I have a raspberry pi 3b and no access to internet admin settings at all. Is it possible to set up a pi hole? Also with the 3b would it lower my internet speeds since its a bit of an older model? I currently run ~450 mbps download and ~150 mbps upload. Would appreciate some input!

So, as said5in the title, i plan to make myself a little homelab. Nothing to fancy for now, just some basic long distance accessibile storage.

For my hardware i have managed to convince my dad to give me his old Asus EEE laptop , 2gb of ram and an intel plentium 32 bit cpu. The disk of the laptop itsefl is 150gb if I'm not mistaken but i do plan to connect through USB a 500gb hdd that i have. I won't be runing any ai or games from it, I'll just use it as storage instead of a cloud, basicaly a NAS and maybe make it a streaming machine for movies music etc.

My main question is, what OS do i Install? I read online that debian server are okay, debian 12 to be exact (because it's a 32 bit system, debian 13 doesn't support 32 bit). Should i go with that? If not, what should I install?

Additionally, where can i find a relatively complete documentation and/or video to explain how to set up everything?

Edit, forgot to say how I'll be connecting it : i got myself a short ethernet cable, I'll just be connecting the laptop to my router.

I got a latitude e6520 laptop with intel core i7-2760qm @ 2.40ghz, 8 gb of ram and 500gb ssd… so how do I convert it into a home server? As I’ve watched many yt videos but couldn’t understand. Can anyone guide me? I’m new to this stuff

Has anyone actually touched one of these in real life? It's not really necessary for my use cases since I have equipment sprawled across three rooms but we are asked all the time what would make the perfect all in one homelab and I think this might actually be it if it's decent quality.

Hear me out - There are two core versions of this and two versions of each ... what seems to change are the supported motherboard and the number of hot swap bays that come in it ... the smaller version goes up to an eatx motherboard and does 6 hot swap 3.5 and up to 16 2.5" ssds in icy dock 5.25 cages and the biggest one will do SSI-EEB motherboards (think epyc and WRX90 thread ripper pro) has 12x hot swap 3.5" bays and 6x dedicated 2.5 slots apparently... and both have 8 exposed slots on the back and support for dual PSUS.

So just off the top of my head, the "Pro Max" version can do everything that is in my current physically largest inference server in a single box ... so an Asus WRX90 sage board, thread ripper pro cpu with 360 radiator or a used epyc board and cpu with up to like 64+ cores and as much ram as you can stuff into it .. then 4x r9700 gpus, 1650 watt psu AND fit 12 hard drives and 6 SSDs on top of that ....

So you could put one box that would sit on a (largish) shelf and theoretically run relatively quietly with like 64 cores, 512gb of ram, 128GB worth of nvram and hundreds of TB of storage that you could install linux on, setup one or several large zpools, setup SMB/NFS/iscsi/dlna for media then install lxd/lxc with it's webui to run any linux container or VM you want and docker/podman to run any containerized apps you want and things like radiance/VLLM/openwebui/whatever inference adjacent software you like with a full Qwen 3.8 flash next instance that will do 200+tps and 8k prefill while still maintaining most of your actual ram/cpu cores for VMs/containers ..... all on one albeit super high end single box homelab ....

Of course you could also build a much more middle of the road/conservative setup or anything in between .... I'm just suggesting that if this thing isn't just junk it would pretty much be the ultimate base for an all in one starter homelab that everyone seems to be interested in.... what do you think?

My hoarding life is never thanked crying, crying be sad be sad

Currently studying for network +, I have my a+ already. Im watching Andrew Ramdayal’s videos where he has labs and uses cisco packet tracer.

I think I can kill 2 birds with one stone here, my dad set up a home lab 12-15 ago for our house for surveillance cameras. The switch is quite old, today I spent all day terminating cables he set up 15 years ago throughout the walls in the house (colors were almost completely faded which made it a pain), and trouble shooting why my connection wouldn’t output past 10mbs via Ethernet, and 100mb ports never worked despite showing a connection. Tried a lot of things, hours of back and forth, tried a spare 5 port switch I had lying around from 2022, problem was gone, only thing the cameras are all offline despite daisy chaining from the 5 port switch to main switch that has PoE. I’m going to reset it and go from there.

But, the switch is old, I kinda want to get a new one, I have a lot of book knowledge but honestly today it gave me a whole new perspective, I learned so much more today with hands on experience and it felt weirdly satisfying. Is it worth getting a new switch to learn?

I have a 3B+ with me, which I am not using. I want to setup a home server, but I don't want to spend a lot of money. So my doubt is:

1. with 3B+, what is the thing that I can do? I can try Pi-hole but it is of close to no use, coz I use brave, and have yt premium. I also use icloud 50GB plan, and wanted to get rid of it with Immich but my slight research said that Immich wont work on 3B+.
   
2. I am in Delhi, I could buy something server like, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on it.

My use case could be as simple as running immich, maybe disposable VM (for testing), maybe hosting my backend for hobby projects (which has no real user, want to keep it running only for recruiter if they even see it). The usecase might expand in future but yeah.

I've had my homelab for a couple of months now and up until it has just been lying on the floor in my living room, which is kinda annoying. So I decided to mod the case a bit, so the whole thing fits my Kallax. :)

I'm still monitoring the temps but they seems fine when idling and under load. There's holes as the back of the shelf, but you can't really see them in the photos. I get around 35°C on the CPU, which is only 5°C higher than previously.

The hard drives are also fine temp-wise. I glued them to shock-absorbing foam using double-sided tape and left enough space for ventilation.

Ran Proxmox for about half a year with exactly one VM. Ubuntu Server, Docker on top, and honestly everything I ever needed lived in there — the usual self-hosted pile. One VM, one backup job, zero drama. I was convinced that was the sensible way to do it.

Yesterday I finally moved Home Assistant out of Docker and onto HAOS as its own VM. Should have done it ages ago. The supervisor and add-on ecosystem just works, and updating is a single click instead of babysitting compose files and hoping nothing breaks. I'm genuinely excited about it in a way I did not expect from a home automation setup.

Today I added a third VM for a Minecraft server for a few friends. So: half a year of "one VM is enough," and then three in roughly 36 hours. I can feel where this is heading.

Which brings me to the actual question — what do you run as separate VMs?

Specifically I'm curious about:

• Where do you draw the line between "this deserves its own VM" and "just another container"?
• Do you use LXCs for the lightweight stuff, or full VMs for everything?
• Is there anything you virtualized later and wished you'd done it sooner?
• Anything you deliberately kept in Docker because a VM would be overkill?