Linux

Sure

I built it out of old PC parts when I upgraded my desktop. I wanted to go full AMD for both the CPU and GPU for the new build so I used the old mobo and got an Intel i3-10100 open box along with a few other random parts like a small nvme drive for a cache drive. I got four 8TB drives to start from a few places, one of them being Mac bid.

Then I found an absolutely massive heavy duty 48u server rack on Craigslist for like 50 bucks. I cut it in half with an angle grinder so it would fit under the steps and gave the other half to my fiance for his music production gear in our studio. I took din rail home from work and drilled & tapped holes in the rack to support it since the top frame was now missing. I put some din rail on the sides to mount my old NUCs and ran game servers on them for a while.

I have a rack mounted UPS on the bottom, the NAS above it in a rosewill case that can take up to like 16 spinning drives I think. I have a 10gb/s fiber connection for loading steam games as fast as the disk can spin. Games really don't have many loading screens nowadays so it works great for storing smaller games that load you in once or twice. The real complicated massive games I still store on my NVME on my desktop.

On top I have my networking equipment. Eventually I'm going to get a full router and NVR with cameras to watch things like birds and the front entrance. I also have a pi-hole.

I have a KVM setup that easily lets me navigate my desktop from the living room and play games in there. It works great. I mounted a remote start button on my living room wall, so now I can turn my PC on, login, press a keybind in hyprland that runs a script I wrote. This will turn off both PC monitors, change sound over, and launch emulationstation-DE which is a front end for all of the emulators, steam games, pirated games, whatever. So now the desktop is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of its CPU/GPU for the game, storing the game on my NAS in the basement, and broadcasting it in 4K / 60 FPS in my living room while I use a controller with zero latency. All on Linux. If 15 year old me who was using Ubuntu could see my setup now he'd geek out. A side note is I love Arch Linux now, and never want to use anything else. But it took me a while to find my way.

This turned into a bit of a tangent about my homelab as a whole, but the OS for the NAS I use is unRAID. The flexibility is unparalleled. You can throw whatever random drives you find in it and they're protected so long as they're the same size or smaller than the parity drive. On the NAS itself I run an *arr stack, Plex, a torrent client, etc. I also use it to download YT videos and have a private collection of things like concerts. Quite a few people use my Plex. My parents are even on it now and they're getting into their 70s.

Really though, the NAS is primarily storage first and foremost. But it's been chugging along for years and is pretty crucial in doing a lot.