HomeLab

It started with a problem: too many devices, not enough storage, and no good way to share files between them without handing everything to a cloud service. The Synology DS220+ was the answer — a plug-and-play 2-bay NAS with a clean web interface and enough smarts to get serious with. Two drives in RAID 1 for mirroring, 2 TB each. It worked well enough to reveal exactly what was possible next.

Docker containers came with it. A handful at first — Home Assistant to centralize the smart home, a media stack starting to take shape. The collection grew faster than the storage. Sixteen terabyte drives went in. But the real ceiling wasn't the drives — it was the architecture. Two bays, RAID 1 only, no path to expand without replacing the whole unit, and Synology locking newer hardware to proprietary drives. The NAS that taught everything had hit its limit.

The replacement wasn't a bigger Synology. It was a full ATX build — the same chassis logic as a gaming PC, but purpose-built for storage and always-on workloads. The operating system was Unraid, chosen specifically because it doesn't require matching drives. Add one drive at a time, any size, and parity protection covers the whole array. Three 16 TB Seagate Exos drives went in: two data, one parity, ~30 TB usable.

The real revelation was the cache pool — two 2 TB NVMe drives in mirrored BTRFS RAID1. All Docker containers run from the NVMe cache. New media writes to the fast drives first; the overnight mover pushes it to the spinning array. The performance difference from the Synology was immediate and obvious. The drives from the old NAS moved over; the Synology was retired. An RTX 4060 went in for hardware video transcoding in Plex and AI object detection for the security cameras via Frigate.

Full build

Drive bays loaded

In production

The early years of running containers was manual — configure through a UI, tweak settings over time, accumulate changes that exist nowhere but inside the running container. Rebuild it and you start over. That fragility was the next thing to fix.

Every container configuration moved into Docker Compose files, stored in a Git repository on the MacBook. Syncthing automatically syncs that repository to the Unraid server. Dockhand reads the compose files and manages deployments. Watchtower handles image version updates. The result: the entire stack can be rebuilt from the repo. Changes flow from Git to the server without any SSH session — edit the file, save it, and Syncthing carries it over. It's a DevOps pipeline for a home server, and it's made the whole system feel solid rather than fragile.

The second machine in the lab isn't a server — it's a gaming rig that pulled too much homelab weight to pretend otherwise. AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 128 GB RAM, and an NVIDIA RTX 5080. It runs Plex Media Server natively, hosts a Hyper-V Kali Linux VM, runs WSL2 Ubuntu for development, and runs LM Studio for local AI inference directly on the 5080. Everything that benefits from raw GPU compute lives here.

The name SCHMIDTFLIX comes from the Plex instance — it's been the household's streaming service since the media stack outgrew relying solely on the Unraid server for playback. The gaming PC handles the transcoding load on the most demanding sessions. It lives in a dedicated closet alongside the networking stack, quietly doing multiple jobs at once.

The closet setup

RTX 5080 inside