Tag: storage

Hardware RAID controllers used to be necessary. Now they're often a liability. Here's when to flash that LSI card to IT mode, when to keep it, and why ZFS specifically refuses to share.

RAID-Z isn't just RAID 5 with a new name. Variable stripe widths, no write hole, and dRAID's distributed spares change the rebuild math entirely.

RAID 5 and 6 don't scale gracefully past 8 drives. RAID 50 and RAID 60 stripe across multiple parity sub-arrays so rebuilds only stress one group. Here's when nesting actually pays off.

Three popular NAS operating systems compared: TrueNAS's ZFS, OMV's flexibility, and Unraid's mixed-disk magic. Which is right for your home lab?

Two ways to give your K8s cluster persistent block storage, Longhorn for simplicity, Rook-Ceph for scale. Real homelab tradeoffs, not vendor marketing slides.

Build a proper DIY NAS in 2026: case selection, CPU choice, drives, HBA card, ZFS pool layout, UPS sizing, and a real power budget that will not fail you.

NVMe drives throttle hard at 70-85C. Here is how to monitor temps, intentionally trigger throttling to confirm it, and pick a heatsink that fixes the issue.

SAS drives are not dead, they are cheap on eBay right now. Here is exactly when used SAS3 hardware beats SATA for home lab storage builds on a budget.

Drive is dying. Which tool do you reach for? ddrescue clones, TestDisk repairs partitions, PhotoRec carves files. They're a workflow, not rivals.

Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.

rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.

Native ZFS dataset encryption vs LUKS under your pool, which layer to encrypt at, performance trade-offs, key management, and raw send/recv.