Home Server

I’ve had a little Synology NAS running all our media, but we’ve slowly outgrown it—so I built a custom one. This is that story.

I’m firmly in the self-hosting camp, but like much of the world I once got swept up in the shiny convenience of cloud providers and services—Google Photos, Netflix, Kindle, and the like.

That shine has started to wear off, and I’m now about 80% free of these services. Late-stage capitalism, nazi-adjacent techbros, and a general distrust of megacorporations have pushed me to self-host as much as possible. Out of necessity (and sanity), there are still a few services I can’t quite ditch—Gmail, YouTube, and Spotify, if you’re curious.

But for everything else, there’s BrightNAS—my home server.

A 10-inch, silver and black rack-mounted server unit on a wooden floor. The top row has a Home Assistant Yellow with a glowing light, below it a patch panel with Ethernet cables connected to a router showing green status lights. The lower sections house several blank panels, drive bays with lockable trays, and a vented cooling panel.

Hardware

This little 10” rack holds a Mini-ITX board with a 12th-gen i5, 32 GB RAM, 50 TB of storage across four 16 TB HDDs, plus 2 TB of M.2 SSDs. There’s also an SFX 80+ Gold PSU, a router, a switch, and Home Assistant. A PoE switch is on the future shopping list—baby steps.

It’s been a genuinely fun project to build. I hadn’t built a PC in decades, so I went in relatively blind. Let’s just say I owe a lot to PC Part Picker, Kieran from work, and ChatGPT.

A surprise side quest was designing and 3D-printing rack parts, which taught me a lot about thermoplastics, CAD software, and the fine art of measuring things properly.

Software

Before BrightNAS, I was running everything via Docker on the old Synology NAS, so sticking with Docker was a no-brainer.

The big decision was which OS to run. My shortlist:

Windows (hahah, no.)
Ubuntu
TrueNAS
unRAID

After plenty of research and Reddit deep-dives, I settled on unRAID. If you want a Docker-forward approach to home servers, it’s worth a look. One of its big advantages is the ability to mix and match disk sizes for storage—something traditional RAID setups don’t typically allow. I won’t pretend to know the deep technical details, but it works, it’s stable, and it’s easy enough to manage for this cosplaying sysadmin.

Some software highlights running on BrightNAS:

Immich — Hands down one of the best open-source projects out there. If you want to ditch Google Photos, start here.
servarr apps — Perfect for managing and acquiring media from across the internet.
Plex — I’ve been using Plex for years. An absolute no-brainer.
Calibre Web Automated — I’ve tried Calibre and Calibre Web before, but CWA is the best eBook hosting setup I’ve found.

Closing thoughts

Building BrightNAS took just over a month of collecting and printing parts, then migrating all the data from the Synology. The transfer was smooth—zero data loss and only about 30 minutes of downtime.

I’m pretty happy to be far less dependent on US tech megacorporations while still having all the software and storage our family needs.

If you’ve been thinking about building a home lab or getting into self-hosting: do it.