Storage guide
Planning HomeLab storage without buying twice
A workload-first way to think about the decision before choosing a specific product.
Storage planning becomes easier when you stop treating “disk space” as one number.
Separate system storage from data storage
Boot volumes and active VM/container disks have different priorities from bulk media, backups and archives. They do not always belong on the same device or storage tier.
Usable capacity is not raw capacity
Redundancy, filesystem choices and implementation overhead mean the capacity you purchase can be higher than the usable data target. Decide the resilience model before buying drives.
Growth needs physical room
Expansion can mean spare drive bays, external storage, a separate NAS or a future migration. A compact compute node may still be the right answer if storage is intentionally separated.
Backup is a different requirement
Redundant storage improves availability but does not replace an independent backup. Treat protection from drive failure and protection from deletion, corruption or device loss as separate design decisions.