homelab

I'm building my own NAS. I've put together gaming PCs and simple workstations, but this will be my first foray into "the big leagues". At this point, I'm planning to use Unraid because it seems quite beginner friendly. I'm not a linux newbie, but I'm no sysadmin either. The thing that's making me question my choice is that I dont plan to take advantage of Unraid's killer feature; the abilty to add any size disk into your array. I've already got as many disks as the case will hold (8 x 12TB). When the inevitable day comes that I need more storage, I'll probably just build a second machine.

I've also looked at TrueNAS Scale a bit, and it seems approachable, but perhaps more capable than I really need. I do plan to run a number of containerized apps, but don't expect I'll need to run any VMs very often. I'm also not sure how I feel about ZFS. I read so many conflicting opinions. So, I haven't decided on a file system yet either.

My primary use cases are: media server, storage server, and homelab playground. I want to self-host as many things as possible so I can stop depending so heavily on enshittifying cloud services. I know I can look a lot of this stuff up And I have been reading whatever I can find. But much of what I've learned in recent months has been a direct result of reading this sub, so I'd love to tap into the knowledge found here.