Homelab / Storage

Storage & Disks

Physical disks in the lab — by role and capacity. Figures are raw capacity (label / vendor values), rounded.

Specs (overview)

  • Total raw: ~70 TB across file/USB NAS, backup datastore, and Ceph OSDs
  • Tiers: hot file, cold/archive, backup, compute (Ceph)
  • Media: HDD (NAS/USB), SSD/NVMe (hypervisor)

Total capacity

Tier Raw capacity (approx.) Role
File / USB NAS ~58 TB Shares, media, cold, Time Machine
Backup datastore ~5 TB Proxmox Backup (USB disk)
Hypervisor (Ceph) ~7 TiB Guest disks on 4× SSD/NVMe
Total ~70 TB Platform overall

Disk inventory

Qty Type / class Capacity Use
3 WD 6 TB (Red / NAS class) 6 TB USB NAS: shares, Time Machine, ISO/templates
1 HGST Ultrastar 6 TB 6 TB USB NAS: media (shared volume with one WD)
1 Seagate One Touch Hub 18 TB Cold archive
1 Seagate IronWolf 12 TB Synology DS118 — file / cold archive
1 Seagate Expansion Desk ≈ 4 TB USB expansion on the Synology
1 WD Elements ≈ 5 TB Proxmox Backup Server — datastore
4 SSD/NVMe (Ceph OSDs) ~7 TiB raw Hypervisor cluster — guest volumes

Tiers in short

  • Hot file storage — documents, pictures, and media live on ZFS/share stacks (TrueNAS/OMV), backed by USB NAS and hypervisor disks.
  • Cold / archive — large USB and Synology volumes for longer-term retention and file copies.
  • Backup — a dedicated USB datastore for VM/container backups; file copies also land on the Synology volume.
  • Compute storage — Ceph on the MS-01 nodes for reproducible guest disks.

Design and backup philosophy (roles, offsite, why not RAID everywhere): Storage & Backup.

Related hardware: Synology DS118, Minisforum MS-01.