My Home e-Storage Solution

For quite some time I’ve been wanting to have a private cloud.

Things to write about

  • OMV vs NixOS
  • HDD vs SSD
    • Storage is expensive!
    • No need to have an archive with SSD (external disk for editing is enough). Unnecessary cost for no real benefit in my case
    • RAID is not needed for home use. In a small business – maybe. It is useful when you need instant access to your files in case a drive fails. If you can handle a few hours / days of downtime it is okay. Especially if you have a cold storage backup
    • Went with IronWolf 6 TB for main disk
    • Still can’t decide what HDD to use for cold storage backup
  • EliteDesk 800
    • No SATA → needs USB Enclosures
    • USB Enclosure won’t slow down the writing speed. The bottleneck is the HDD itself, not the interface.
    • Small form factor but the HDD limitation is frustrating
  • USB Enclosures:
    • UGREEN 3.5” USB 3.0 Enclosure
    • ORICO 3588US3 ???
    • One practical tip: on OMV, you can use the hdparm or udisks spindown settings to control when USB drives go to sleep, and schedule your daily backup with a cron job or the OMV scheduled tasks plugin. The USB enclosure will show up as a standard block device — OMV handles USB storage natively.
  • Scan paper to SMB directly
  • ext4 or btrfs
  • You want CMR drives
  • Tailscale

Claude suggests this workflow for

The workflow becomes:

Shoot → import to T7 on your Mac Edit → full speed, everything local Finish → move completed project folder to NAS (drag and drop, or a simple script) NAS → borgmatic backs up to cold storage + BorgBase nightly

Yours truly,
Coditis