Building out my Home Lab

Building My Home Lab NAS: An Introduction

Welcome! This blog series is my attempt to document and share everything I’ve learned—both the successes and pitfalls—while building out my own home NAS and home lab platform while I've been recovering from chemo and transplant woes. If you’ve ever thought about taking control of your own storage, running your own services, or simply want to understand the world of homelabbing, this is for you!

What’s a Home Lab, and Why Bother?

A home lab is a personal playground for tech enthusiasts, tinkerers, and professionals who want more control over their digital lives. It might start with a simple network-attached storage (NAS) device to hold backups and media, but it can quickly grow into an ecosystem running automation, smart home integrations, private servers, and even custom services.

For me, the journey started when I realized cloud storage was missing the flexibility and privacy I wanted for media, backups, and experiments. A local NAS lets me own my data, run whatever I want, and learn in the process.

What This Series Will Cover

This series will walk step-by-step through the build and setup of my home NAS and supporting services:

Planning and Choosing Hardware: How I selected my case, motherboard, drives, and what influenced those decisions.
Picking the Right OS: We’ll compare major NAS and home lab operating systems (unRAID, TrueNAS, Proxmox) and I’ll explain why I landed where I did.
Automating Media with the ARR Stack: I’ll show you how I connected tools like Sonarr and Radarr to make media downloads hands-off and reliable.
Network, VPN, and Security Basics: The essentials for keeping home services safe but accessible.
Monitoring and Visualization: Building dashboards and alerts using open-source tools like Grafana and Prometheus.
Advanced Projects and Lessons Learned: Hosting game servers, automating tasks, scaling up, and everything in between.

Who Should Follow Along?

This series is for anyone interested in learning about:

Self-hosting, privacy, and DIY infrastructure
Building robust storage platforms
Modern automation for home or small business
Troubleshooting, monitoring, and evolving technical systems

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to level up your own lab, you’ll find practical advice, example setups, and honest accounts of what worked and what didn’t.

What’s Next?

In the next post, I’ll lay out my goals for the project and dive into the planning and research that set the foundation for the build.
Stick around—this is going to be a fun (and sometimes bumpy) ride.

Introduction to NAS and Homelabs

What is a NAS? What is a home lab?
Why build a home lab – motivations, benefits, and use cases
Overview of the journey ahead

Planning and Component Selection

Needs assessment: Storage, compute, expandability
Choosing a case (size, drive bays, airflow, noise)
Motherboard criteria: chipset, expansion, IO, form factor
Key supporting hardware (CPU, RAM, PSU, cooling)

Storage Strategy and Disk Decisions

HDD vs SSD: Pros and cons for a NAS
RAID concepts, ZFS, and alternatives
Noise, heat, and power considerations

Operating System Showdown: unRAID, TrueNAS, and Proxmox

Feature breakdown and comparison table
Why choose each platform? Licensing and community support
Walkthrough: My actual decision and install experience

ARR Stack Deep-Dive: Automating Media

What is the ARR stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, qBittorrent)?
How automation works: environment design and API utilization
Step-by-step setup and issue troubleshooting

Networking, VPN, and Access Controls

Network architecture basics for homelabs
Secure remote access: VPN solutions and firewall design
Isolating services for safety

Monitoring, Visualization, and Alerts

The importance of monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus
Building dashboards and tracking resource usage
Alerting strategies for hardware and service failures

Advanced Services and Integrations

Game server hosting, AI agents, home automation hooks
Benefits and caveats of containerized apps (Docker setups)
Performance tweaks and fun experiments

Maintenance, Upgrades, and Lessons Learned

Backups and disaster recovery plans
Strategies for scaling up or migrating
Reflections and advice for new builders