Can anyone recommend a good server for a homelab to use for a storage purpose like this?

I still pay for snooty, and the reason for that is that when a disk goes bad (not if; when) I pop its tray out, replace the disk, pop the tray with the disk back in, click a couple of widgets, and that’s it. I know it will be rebuilt properly.

(And I know I have to do that, because when the disk fails it beeps and lights a led near the bad disk)

It’s easy to build a NAS such as the one described in this article, but in the long run, data loss is significantly more likely.

Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.

I came to the same conclusion when I built my NAS. Just Nix for the system, zfs for raid and docker compose for any service I might want to run. https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-08/03-diy_nas_on_nixos

Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last past weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants).

I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about 25% cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-filled). The shucking was easier than I expected too, and the performance seems very comparable. The warranty is a definite downside (European, so no Magnuson-Moss), but I think I can even get them back in their enclosure should they fail during the 2-year warranty period.

I've put some second hand 256 GB M.2 SSDs in there as boot drives. It was a bit of a struggle to get it to work in a way that failure of one of the drives doesn't hold up booting, combined with LUKS, TPM keys and ZFS on root. Learned a lot about systemd-boot which I have never used before, but feels a lot saner to me than grub ever was. So now I have a large script which debootstraps a Debian based NAS into being.

I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting. For example TFA mentions ECC RAM, which in some circles is a must-have because ZFS would wreck your pool during a scrub otherwise, which is a myth. It's also very expensive, especially this year. You also don't need much RAM for ZFS, L2ARC doesn't use much RAM at all, to name a few others.

Still doubting about setting `dnodesize=auto` (which is the default), because there are some horror stories about that [1]. And it seems impossible to find a cloud storage provider with reasonable prices that supports `zfs send`. Rsync.net upped their minimum order to 10 TiB recently, which is far too much for my use case.

[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11353

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html

Yeah no. When it comes to backups and data storage, I would rather use a proven reliable system that’s been used and tested by millions of other users, keep these hacky stuff for your hyperland set up.

this is really cool. I've been dealing with an aging Synology nas and this is something I can pick up, evaluate performance and how safe it is to serve as home for my data.

Stopped reading at "Debian".

Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.

ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux (due to usual open-source politics).

I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.

FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding. Quality-wise it has reached parity with Illumos.

If you can afford Solaris then you're probably not building your own NAS from parts of lesser computers.