Homelab
Some 1½ year ago I started my homelab.
I wanted to have a small local server to serve as NAS and a server for private services. I pay for iCloud and Google Drive for photos and documents storage, but I also want to have my backups locally and independently. Also, my wife’s and mine’s Time Machine backups are already quite big and the bill for cloud services would be significant.
The same for local services, which I want to run without dependency on network availability and without sharing too much private information. These are for example, Paperless to store all sorts of documents, or CarConnectivity to track various stats of my car.
Hardware
I chose CM3588 NAS Kit to run my homelab for many reasons:
- It is not restricted to some proprietary vendor OS, I run Debian there with any software I want
- It runs on ARM, with passive cooling (no noise at all) and low energy consumption
- It supports up to 4 NVME SSD drives
- I could 3D print a case for it!
My CM3588 based homelab in a 3D printed case
Four SSD drives might be an overkill, but I really wanted it to be fanless and quiet. Increased disk access speed is not that important to me. As for total storage volume, I don’t need much, so a few 2TB drives in RAID array are enough for me.
SSD
For price-performance ratio I initially chose Western Digital Blue SN580 SSDs. However, I wouldn’t recommend them, as two of them crashed suddenly and, of course, at very inconvenient time. Sandisk (which are owners of Western Digital now) replaced them without questions, respect to them. But still, I needed to set up a lot of the things again.
An important lesson learned was that my backups worked and I didn’t lose any unrecoverable data.
Software
As mentioned above, I run Paperless on it, and I will write a separate blog post about it later.
I also want to expand the number of self-hosted services this year with:
Do you know any other services worth trying?
This is post 41 of #100DaysToOffload
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