Expanding Our Home Storage

My original Mini Data Center was running out of space and I had to decide whether to build a huge new 200TB+ NAS or just add another 100TB box to what was already there.

Building a 200TB+ server from scratch would have been expensive. A pre-built chassis like the TrueNAS R20 would be over $7,000, and the hard drives would be another $4,000+. If I went with something like a SuperMicro + RackMount, I would’ve needed a special PCIe card flashed to IT mode to handle all the drives, which seemed like too much hassle and risk.

I went with a 45Drives HL-8 chassis from their new Home Lab series, which gave me the 100TB of storage I was looking for. It was loaded with eight 20TB refurbished drives from Server Part Deals. The system has an AMD Ryzen 7 and 64GB of RAM, which is powerful enough for video transcoding. I’m not too concerned about using refurbished drives.

This one was set up with TrueNAS Scale in a RAIDZ2 configuration, similar to my other NAS running TrueNAS Core. That means two drives can fail without any data loss. Rsync scripts are used to back up important data to the second machine, which is a big benefit of having two separate systems.

Since TrueNAS Scale supports Docker, I’m using it to run different apps. I replaced Google Photos with Immich. Every photo from my phone automatically syncs to the NAS and is archived using rsync. It’s a great way to organize my photos privately.

It also runs my main AdGuard Home instance, with the other NAS acting as the backup DNS. It’s also used to store OS ISOs, game backups, ROMs, and Windows installers that are used a lot.

This temporarily solves our massive storage needs and keeps me from needing to build a full rack in our basement. We’ll see what the future has in store when this second NAS fills up.