From Napster to 180TB: How I Built a Homelab That Got Completely Out of Hand
A 1GB hard drive, Napster, and twenty-five years of watching a hobby get completely out of hand.
There's a 1GB hard drive sitting somewhere in my memory that started all of this.
My uncle handed it to me like it was a gift from the future. "You will never fill this," he said. He wasn't being dramatic — at the time, that was a reasonable thing to believe. A gigabyte. More space than most people would ever need. We built that computer together on his kitchen table, and I remember being genuinely awed by the idea that I owned something that could hold that much.
I now have roughly 180 terabytes of storage across two systems, about 175TB of which is full. I stopped counting drives a long time ago.
This is the story of how that happened — and why, if you're reading this, something similar has probably already started happening to you.
The 90s: You Either Bought the CD or You Didn't
Before streaming, before downloads, before any of this — if you wanted music, you went to a store. That was the deal.
I was a kid who wanted music my parents wouldn't buy me. Not because they were unreasonable — they had opinions about what belonged in the house, and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP was not on the approved list. So I did what every kid did in 1999: I found another way.
I'm not going to pretend that era was about technology. It wasn't. It was about access. The realization that hit me — the one that stuck — was simpler than piracy or music or any of that. It was this: you could own a copy of something, entirely, on a machine you controlled. No store. No middleman. No one deciding whether you could have it.
That idea never really left.
The 2000s: DVDs, Plex, and the Art of Manual File Renaming
By the time I was in my early twenties, the format had shifted from music to movies. Netflix had started mailing DVDs. I had a laptop and too much time.
I won't go into specifics, but I will say that by the mid-2000s I had a growing folder of .mkv files named things like movie.final.REPACK.BluRay.x264-GROUP.mkv that I was renaming by hand. Painstakingly. One at a time.
In 2012 I found Plex.
If you've never set up Plex for the first time, it's hard to explain what that felt like. You point it at a folder. It looks at your files. And then suddenly you have something that looks like Netflix — except it's yours, it runs in your house, and everything in it is something you put there deliberately. I remember just scrolling through the library. Cover art. Descriptions. Everything organized.
I was immediately hooked. I was also immediately annoyed that I still had to rename files manually.
That problem had a solution. I just didn't know about it yet.
2014: The Arr Stack Changes Everything
Sometime around 2014 I fell down a Reddit rabbit hole and came out the other side knowing about Radarr and Sonarr.
For anyone unfamiliar: Radarr manages your movie library. Sonarr manages TV shows. They monitor for new content, grab it automatically when it becomes available, rename it correctly, and drop it exactly where Plex expects it. The whole pipeline runs without you touching anything.
I want to be clear about what I'm describing here: automated media library management. You configure it once. It runs forever. Your library stays organized and up to date with zero manual work.
The effect on my setup was immediate. The old gaming rig I'd been using as a Plex server got a new purpose. I started with the Windows desktop apps — clunky, but functional. Radarr first, then Sonarr. I ran out of drive bays fast. Then I ran out of space fast.
My solution, for an embarrassingly long time, was to just... keep adding drives. I wasn't mounting them in anything — I was literally setting hard drives inside the case wherever they'd fit. Airflow was, to put it politely, a concern. The case was so porous that it pulled air from everywhere, which I told myself was fine. The drives never died, so maybe it was.
The Synology Era: My First Real NAS (and 120TB of RAID)
At some point "drives loose in a gaming rig" stopped being an acceptable long-term strategy.
I bought a Synology NAS — my first real network-attached storage device. Filled it with drives. Ran out of bays. Bought a Synology expansion unit. Filled that too.
I ended up with a RAID5 array sitting at 120TB of usable capacity. That felt, at the time, like the ceiling. I couldn't imagine filling it.
It currently has 115TB of data on it.
The Synology is still running. I learned something important when I tried to migrate away from it: you cannot reduce the storage pool in a RAID5 array. The plan had been to copy data off, pull a drive, add it somewhere else, copy more data, repeat. That's not how RAID5 works. The data is striped across all drives simultaneously. You can't remove one and expect the rest to hold together.
I still haven't fully moved off it. The Synology just sits there, humming, full of data, too stubborn to be decommissioned.
Docker: The Thing That Changed How I Think About Software
Somewhere in this timeline — I'm compressing a few years here — I moved to Docker.
I'd been running apps natively on Windows, then in VMs, then as Linux installs. Docker was different. The concept took a while to click: every application lives in its own container, isolated from everything else, with its own dependencies, its own networking, its own little world. You define what you want in a compose file. You run it. You can tear it down and bring it back up identically on any machine.
The first time I spun up a full media stack in Docker — Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, and everything else — in about twenty minutes, I just sat back and stared at it. That used to take me a weekend.
Everything I run now is containerized. I cannot imagine going back.
Unraid: The Chapter That Required a Rack
A coworker — I'll call him Jomo, because that's his name, and he deserves credit — mentioned Unraid to me like it was obvious. "You're not running Unraid?"
I was not running Unraid.
Unraid is a NAS operating system that, among other things, lets you mix drives of different sizes in a single array, use a parity drive for protection, and run Docker containers and VMs natively. It's purpose-built for exactly what I was trying to do. The Synology was powerful but constrained. Unraid was a blank canvas.
I wanted to run it on real hardware. That meant a proper server chassis with real drive bays, not another consumer tower stuffed with drives. I started researching — and quickly discovered that consumer rack-mount chassis barely exist as a market. If you want a 24-bay 2U server chassis, you're buying enterprise gear.
I learned more about HBA (Host Bus Adapter) cards than I ever intended to. The short version: you cannot just plug SAS/SATA drives into PCIe cards indefinitely and expect full throughput. There are correct ways to connect lots of drives to a server, and they involve HBA cards, SAS backplanes, and proper cabling. I learned this the expensive way.
The chassis I eventually bought had three backplanes that needed to be replaced. I replaced them. It was annoying and instructive.
Finding the rack was its own adventure. I spent time on construction sites — I work in engineering and knew where to look — until I found a two-post 54U rack. Not exactly a clean server room setup. But it was mine. It fit in the space. The gaming rig went into the chassis. The chassis went into the rack. Unraid went onto the server.
Current state: Cerberus (my Unraid server) has about 60TB of storage capacity and is sitting at 95% full. I have a 20TB drive pre-clearing as I write this, which is exactly as satisfying as it sounds.
The Home Theatre: A Different Kind of Rabbit Hole
Somewhere along the way, "home theatre" stopped meaning "TV in the living room" and became a full project.
I'm not going to undersell it: I have a dedicated 6-chair home theatre. Klipsch speakers in a 7.1.4 Atmos configuration. A Denon AVR-X4800H receiver. An Nvidia Shield as the media client. The whole thing running through Plex, fed from the server I just described.
Getting there involved cable routing decisions I'm still thinking about, a chair that almost didn't fit through a door (it didn't fit through the door, actually — I had to disassemble it), and more late nights on AVSForum than I care to admit.
The result is worth it every single time I use it.
Home Automation: The Rabbit Hole Beneath the Rabbit Hole
Home Assistant deserves its own article. Several articles. Maybe a book.
The short version: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that runs locally, doesn't require a cloud subscription, and can integrate with virtually everything. I started with a few smart switches. I now have automations running for lighting, presence detection, cameras, energy monitoring, and things I've half-forgotten I set up.
The appeal, as with everything else in this list, is control. Not "control" as in micromanaging every light switch. Control as in: I decide what runs in my house, what data leaves it, and what happens when. No subscription. No Terms of Service that change without notice. No company going out of business and bricking my devices.
More on this — a lot more — in future posts.
Privacy: Why This Actually Matters
There's a thread running through everything I've described, and it's not just about tech toys or storage capacity.
Every major platform you use is, to some degree, a data collection operation that also provides a service. Your streaming library knows what you watch and when. Your smart home devices phone home constantly. Your router logs are someone's business intelligence.
I'm not a purist about this. I still have a Google account, I carry a smartphone, my car phones home about things I'd rather it didn't. But over the years I've gotten pickier about which parts of my life I hand to someone else's server, and the self-hosted alternatives have gotten easier and cheaper every year I've paid attention.
I'll write about this properly in its own post. Short version: it's not paranoia, it's just reading the thing you're about to click "I agree" on.
Vibe-Coding: The Part I'm Most Embarrassed to Admit and Most Proud Of
I went to college for engineering. I was not a bad programmer — I understood the concepts, could write functional code in a few languages, could read and modify things reasonably well. But I never sat down and learned it. Not properly. I always felt like there was a gap between what I could understand and what I could build.
That gap is closing.
AI coding tools have changed what I'm capable of producing. Not because they write code and I watch — but because they've become a genuinely good pair programmer. I describe what I want. They draft it. I understand it, modify it, ask questions, push back when something seems wrong. The gap between having an idea and having working software is now much smaller than it used to be.
I shamelessly vibe-code. Custom Home Assistant automations, internal tools, scripts that automate the annoying parts of my workflow — things that would have taken me weeks to figure out alone now take an evening.
I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It's one of the best things that's happened to how I work.
Where It Stands Today
Here's the current state of the lab, as honestly as I can describe it:
- Unraid server (Cerberus): 24-bay chassis, ~60TB capacity, 95% full, 1x 20TB pre-clearing
- Synology NAS: Still running, 120TB usable, 115TB full, stubbornly refuses to be retired
- Networking: UniFi stack, VLANs, Pi-hole, the works
- Home automation: Home Assistant, Lutron Caseta, cameras, presence detection
- Media stack: Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Unraid, full Docker stack
- Home theatre: 6-chair, 7.1.4 Atmos, Klipsch/Denon, Nvidia Shield
What I'd Do Differently
The question everyone asks and nobody answers honestly:
I'd buy the right chassis the first time. I spent more money replacing backplanes and sourcing parts for a chassis that was never quite right than a proper unit would have cost.
I'd learn Docker earlier. The years I spent fighting with native installs and VMs are years I could have spent with compose files.
I'd get the rack sooner. There's a version of this hobby where you build it properly from the start. I did not take that path. I regret the detour, not the destination.
I'd stop telling myself I'd "never fill" the storage. You will fill it. Budget accordingly.
What's Next
This site is where I document what I'm building, what's breaking, and what I wish someone had told me five years ago. Build logs, gear I've actually bought, lessons I paid for in downtime.
If any of that sounds useful, stick around.