HomeNAS V1
The Beginning — Laptop & Docker
I built a Home NAS server to play around with Docker. Version 1 included running Docker locally on my laptop. I had a couple of Docker images but it wasn't perfect. I also ran out of storage — fast.
HomeNAS V2
Salvaged PCs & Ubuntu — 16GB DDR2, 8TB RAID 1
I managed to get hold of 3 old PCs running Windows XP. The PCs were old but working. I took out the one with the best motherboard and CPU — all 3 PCs had 4GB DDR2. I was able to build a server with 16GB DDR2, a boot drive, and 2× 4TB in a software RAID 1.
The OS of choice was Ubuntu (GUI). With Docker installed on top of it, I played around with more containers — Portainer, Cockpit, and others. Some images kept corrupting because in South Africa we suffer from load shedding.
HomeNAS V3
CentOS CLI — 12TB RAID 1, First Disk Failure
After about a year I ran into a familiar problem — out of storage again, and no more SATA slots. I managed to get my hands on 3× 6TB drives.
I chose to redo the server one more time, opting for CentOS CLI only to conserve resources. I rebuilt with 2× 6TB in RAID 1. These were second-hand drives — and I experienced 1 disk failure along the way with zero data loss.
HomeNAS V4
UnraidOS — i3 10th Gen, ZFS, 18TB & Growing
After 6–8 months of smooth sailing I ran out of storage yet again. I decided to go more robust. I bought an i3-10th Gen motherboard, 8GB DDR4 RAM, a new PSU, case, and SATA expander.
I installed UnraidOS — an OS that boots from USB and is headless, managed via a browser GUI. I had 3 data drives with ZFS and 1 parity drive — 12TB of data protected, plus an SSD for persistent Docker container config files.
This new iteration gave me much deeper exposure to Docker, file permissions, fileshare, DNS, NGINX, and PostgreSQL. I deployed a VM on the machine, played around with networking, and eventually expanded to 18TB.
This has been my 5-year HomeNAS journey — and it's not done yet.