The problem was boring
I didn't set out to build a homelab. I set out to stop losing sleep over my desktop being the only place my family's photos and documents lived. My main machine is a Ryzen 5600G build I use every day, for work and everything else, and it made me nervous that a bad Windows update or a dead drive could take everything with it.
The first version was two drives and a share
So the fix was simple, almost embarrassingly so. I put two 8TB IronWolf drives into the desktop in a ZFS mirror, called it ironwolf-mirror, and shared it out over Samba so my laptop and everyone's phones could reach it. That was the entire homelab for a while. One box, one share, no redundancy beyond the mirror itself.
Why that wasn't good enough
It worked fine right up until I wanted to swap a GPU or reboot for a driver update, and realized the "NAS" went down every time I touched my daily driver. That's the moment this stopped being a NAS with a computer attached to it and started being a computer with a NAS attached to it, and I didn't like being on the wrong side of that sentence. I didn't have a five year plan when I started. I just knew the files needed to live somewhere that wasn't also my Steam library.
Next up: giving an old HP laptop a job before the NAS itself ever moved.
Read how that box got built →