6 reasons a NAS is your Best Home Lab Investment

When it comes to spending our precious hard earned money on a home lab, you want to make your resources count. Many ask when getting into a home lab, what is the best investment and best “bang for the buck”. There are many choices you could make, from investing in expensive networking gear, mini PCs, or something else. However, let’s talk about why a NAS is your best home lab investment to start out with.

What is a NAS?

First of all, what is a NAS? You may have heard the term before, but what is it exactly and what does it do? A NAS is short for network attached storage. It is essentially an enclosure with anywhere from a single disk up to multiple disks that can be attached to over the network.

Network attached storage devices (NAS) allow you to store and access files and other resources over the network instead of having your storage attached only locally in a workstation or server.

Below is an example of a Synology Diskstation 923+:

Below, you can see the network ports on the back of a NAS device. in this way, the NAS can act like a server that is able to serve out files.

Why is it your best home lab investment?

Today’s NAS devices are not just “dumb” storage. They are very sophisticated and powerful “all in one” solutions that can function as a server, network storage, virtual host, docker host, and run all of your favorite applications in one device, without the complexity of stringing multiple devices together for compute, storage, and networking.

Let’s focus on the following reasons for investing in a NAS:

1. They are easy to setup
2. They contain compute, networking, and storage in one device
3. You can use them as a server
4. They can run virtual machines and containers
5. You can use them for backups
6. Today’s NAS devices contain hybrid configurations for performance

1. They are easy to setup

Most NAS devices run very advanced and sophisticated operating systems in their own right that allow you to have a “LAN in a can”. With the NAS operating system, you can setup and manage your storage, install applications, run virtual machines and containers, and also have a backup solution for other devices in your environment.

Synology NAS devices are some of the best “off the shelf” NAS devices you can buy and the DSM software is intuitive and easy to use for most use cases.

Below is a look at the Synology DSM desktop.

In additon though, there are many open source nas operating systems out there, like TrueNAS that are home lab favorites, allowing you to roll your own storage environment and control the software running on your NAS hardware.

TrueNAS provides a powerful way to run apps and storage in a home lab as you can use it to run containerized apps, virtual machines, and ZFS storage.

2. They contain compute, networking, and storage in one device

With a NAS, you can serve out files, create targets for virtual machine storage, such as iSCSI or NFS, and you can run containers directly on the NAS itself. You can do all of this without having to piece together a solution from a separate server, attached to a separate storage device and the requirement for a network switch to connect those components and devices. The NAS is all self-contained in that sense.

Since they have their own NAS operating system as well that is accessible over the network, you don’t have to have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor attached either. You can simply administer everything over the network.

3. You can use them as a server

With today’s NAS devices, it is important to remember that you are not just getting “storage” and that is it. You are getting basically a server that has internally attached storage that can be accessed over the network like any other server you would configure and connect to the network, including Windows Servers or Linux servers.

Below, you can see the file and SAN services that are found in a Synology NAS device.

In the SAN manager, you can see LUNs created to target from Proxmox and other hypervisors. So, not only can you simply use the NAS natively as a storage device, once you start building around your NAS if you want to expand your lab environment, you can target the NAS for storing virtual machines, containers, etc from Proxmox and other hypervisors.

In addition to storage servers, NAS devices can serve as web servers, database servers, LDAP servers, backup servers, and media servers just to name a few.

4. They can run virtual machines and containers

One of the main reasons that many want to run a home lab is to run virtual machines and containers. Running virtual machines and containers traditionally require running a server loaded with VMware vSphere, Proxmox, Hyper-V, or some other hypervisor.

However, with today’s NAS devices, you can run virtual machines natively on the NAS itself, without needing a separate virtual server host to run VMs.

Below is a look at the Synology virtual machine manager that you can install to natively run virtual machines.

Below is the container manager found in Synology DSM.

Open source NAS operating systems like TrueNAS have powerful virtualization capabilities built into the platform.

5. You can use them for backups

One of the really great ways a NAS can be used in a home lab is for backups. Not only can you use a NAS as the target for backing up your workstations, macs, or other devices, you can actually run enterprise grade backup solutions directly on them or target these with enterprise backup solutions.

One of the ways I use one of my NAS devices in the home lab is to run my backup solution directly on the NAS device. As you can see below, you can run backup solutions directly on your Synology NAS device. If you buy a Synology NAS, one of the great pieces of software you get for free is Active Backup for Business. This is a professional backup solution for backing up your workstation, virtual machines running in VMware or Hyper-V, etc.

6. Today’s NAS devices contain hybrid configurations for performance

In the past, some have steered away from running serious workloads directly on a NAS device since spinning disks are extremely slow compared to today’s flash or NVMe drives. However, modern NAS devices, have the capability to run hybrid configurations, meaning they take the best of both worlds (spinning disks and flash) and combine these into a single package. What do we mean?

Today’s NAS devices often have a combination of M.2 slots along with the traditional SATA interfaces for spinning disks. To go along with that, you can setup the M.2 drives such as NVMe drives as a “cache” tier. This means that the first read or write operations will come from flash storage instead of the much slower spinning disks.

This combination gives you the “feel” of flash storage, and the capacity of spinning disks which is a win/win. Especially if you are running virtualized workloads on your NAS device, this combination of a very fast cache tier makes a huge difference.

To show what this looks like in a modern NAS, below is a screenshot from my Terramaster F4-424 Max NAS device. It has a feature called hyper cache that allows you to take (2) M.2 drives and combine these in a RAID 1 mirror for redundancy and use these for read-write caching operations.

Thinking about the benefits of a NAS in the home lab

There is no question that running a NAS in a home lab is a great central building block for running self-hosted services. In my opinion, this is one of the best home lab investments as it provides a building block on which you can add to. A NAS provides the centrarlized storage that can be used for everything from file storage and shares to running LUNs for your virtualization environment.

However, if you choose not to run a separate server for virtualization, the NAS itself can act as the virtualization host and storage all in one and allow you to run virtual machines and containers on top of your NAS hardware directly.

NAS devices are not the only hardware that you will benefit from running in the home lab. However, they are a central component that will give you the storage to work with, no matter what hardware you decide to attach to it. Let me know in the comments what type of NAS you are running and what you like about it.