Large storage

Large Storage at home

Right now I have a few tiny/mini/micro machines that run proxmox at home. They take 1 m.2 NVMe, and 1 2.5 inch sata drive. This doc explains options what to do when I need larger storage.

$50/year - Torguard VPN is needed as a replacement VPN for anything I end up doing at home.

External HDD

This option is to just get a USB 3.0+ external hard drive and attach it to one of the PVE servers.

• $32 - Sabrent USB 3.0 docking station - Has a fan to cool the HDD
• $76 - 6 TB enterprise 3.5 HDD
• $108 - Total

Pros

• Cheapest

Cons

• No redundancy
• Can only have data one 1 PVE server.
• Limited to the speed of 1 HDD.

N100 Nas

This option uses a N100 mobo that has 2 m.2 NVMe slots and 6 Sata ports. It also has 4 2.5Gbe so I could use it as a router as well.

• $80 - Small nas case that takes 4 HDDs
• $132 - Topton N100 Mobo
• $76 - 6 TB enterprise 3.5 HDD
• $35 - 512 GB NVMe
• $323 - Total with no redundancy
• $434 - Total with raid 0 redundancy.

Compared

Right now I pay $171 annually for 3TB of storage, it also comes with a free VPN service that I use.

• ROI on external HDD - 108 + 50 = 158, but only 50 is AR. So I save $13 the first year, and then $121 every year after. So ROI should be about 2.5 years.