Storage and NAS

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An Iomega Jaz drive sits on a surface with a 1GB Jaz cartridge placed on top, showcasing the removable storage format popular in the late 1990s.
Hot-swappable hard drives seemed brilliant in the '90s—here's why Iomega Jaz never stood a chance

The Jaz drive wasn't music to anyone's ears.

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High angle view of the homelab NAS stack and mini PCs.
Everyone says my NAS needs an SSD cache (it doesn't)

It's a cool thing to have. But a worthy investment? Maybe not.

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Immich running on an Android phone.
I stopped paying for Google Photos the moment I discovered this self-hosted alternative

Your massive photo library is the perfect excuse to buy a NAS

A laptop with an external hard drive operating as a NAS.
I tried to ditch cloud storage for self-hosting. Three drives and a mini PC later, I gave up

There are time sucks, and then there are time sucks.

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The back of the Crucial T710 NVMe SSD sitting on a walnut shelf.
Your SSD is doing extra work you don't know about—here's how to fix it
SSD

Your SSD needs more than just free space.

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Drive trays fanned out from the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS showing the tool-free tray design and an installed hard drive.
Closets are killing your NAS performance, even the fanless ones

Your NAS is throttling itself in that closet

A hand holding a Seagate IronWolf 4TB hard drive at an angle showing the label and specs.
Stop ignoring disk partitions—4 reasons they are more useful on a 4TB SSD than ever before

Why partitioning your largest drives actually makes sense now (when it didn't before)

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A hand inserting a Seagate IronWolf 4TB hard drive into the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS with the IronWolf label visible.
Stop wasting drives on RAID 6—why I ditched it for RAID 5 in my homelab

I ditched RAID 6 for RAID 5, and I'm not looking back

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A hand holds an LTO tape.
The storage format that costs $5 per terabyte—but requires a $10,000 drive

This is the storage format every datahoarder wants to use (but can't)

Two WD Black NVMe SSDs installed in both M.2 slots on the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS motherboard.
My NAS cache drive crashed everything—here's what I did wrong

I thought a cache drive would supercharge my NAS, but it created an unexpected bottleneck instead

Two RAM sticks with some binary code connected to each other.
RAM disks are insanely fast, but I'm not using one—and neither should you
RAM

RAM disks easily beat PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but I still won't touch them

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Two WD Black NVMe SSDs installed in both M.2 slots on the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS motherboard.
RAID 0 is a data-loss nightmare: Here is the only reason I still run it in my homelab

RAID 0 isn't worth it—unless you're backing it up every night

The rear IO panel of the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS showing USB, dual 10GbE LAN, HDMI, and OCuLink ports.
Your NAS has USB ports: 4 practical uses most people miss

Stop leaving your NAS USB ports empty—4 brilliant ways to instantly upgrade your home server

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A hand holding the Crucial X10 portable SSD with a weeping willow tree in the background.
I gave my old SSD one job: Be the test dummy for everything risky
SSD

Why my spare SSD is where all my questionable PC experiments go

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Samsung SATA SSD
Stop buying consumer SSDs: Used enterprise drives have petabytes left to give

The used enterprise SSD market is the PC building hack nobody talks about enough

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A WD Blue and HGST hard drive sitting in an old tech drawer.
I turned an old HDD into cold storage for files that matter, and it changed how I organize everything

Stop hoarding files on your main drive: Build a digital attic instead

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Close-up of a NAS server with labeled markers showing do’s and don’ts for homelab setup.
These 4 NAS mistakes are wasting your electricity (and your money)

Your NAS is quietly running up your power bill, but here's how to fix it

A Samsung SATA SSD.
Don't throw away your old 120GB SATA SSD—here's what I actually use mine for
SSD

That tiny SATA drive you forgot about is perfect for one job most people overlook

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A homelab shelf with a Ugreen NAS, mini PCs, a network switch, and rack servers.
My single homelab server became a nightmare, so I split it into eight

I stopped running everything on one server, and my homelab is finally stable

The rear IO panel of the Ugreen iDX6011 Pro NAS showing USB, dual 10GbE LAN, HDMI, and OCuLink ports.
Your NAS has a second Ethernet port—6 reasons you actually need to use it

That second Ethernet port on your NAS isn't just redundancy—it's a security upgrade