# Why I Bypassed FUSE: Building a Transparent DataTiering Engine in Rust (opens in new tab)

If you run a home lab or manage large datasets, you’ve hit this wall: NVMe drives are fast but too expensive to hoard data on. Hard drives or cloud buckets are cheap, but they are slow and a pain to manage manually. The enterprise world solves this with HSM Hierarchical Storage Managementautomatically shuffling colddata to slow storage while keeping a transparent stub on the fast drive. But enterprise HSMs cost thousands of dollars and lock your data in proprietary black boxes. I wanted this ...