It’s easy to get enamored by the large server racks and cabinets that seem to be all over homelab internet lately. Multiple switches, gateways, redundant systems, a rack-mounted server, and so much more. I was much the same. However, there comes a point when your home lab stops being a hobby and starts feeling like a part-time job. For some, it is an extension of their job. But if you’re a hobbyist like me, it can get overwhelming pretty quickly. Look, I tried to convince myself that it was part of learning and experimenting, but when you’re spending more time updating, patching issues, and fixing things, you know things are getting out of hand.

For the longest time, I had a full-sized tower full of spinning drives, a powerful CPU that kept the fans whirring, with nothing really to justify the load and power consumption. But recently, I started adding up what the so-called homelab was costing me and realized I was paying a rather dramatic amount for something I didn’t really need. Add to that the heat and just the overhead of maintaining a high-performance system optimally, and it got me thinking. Of course, I still wanted and needed a server. But what I needed was something compact and reliable. More specifically, a place to keep my files, media, backups, and a few Docker containers. The answer wasn’t another build or mini PC. It was a NAS.

Rethinking what my homelab needed

A more purpose-driven setup

The thing about home labs is that they tend to expand to fill whatever space and time you give them. You start with one small project like a Plex server, and before long, you’re experimenting with VLANs, containers, and self-hosted dashboards. But for the longest time, my stack has been ready. Things worked as I wanted. And most of my time was spent maintaining it.

That’s when I started looking at what my lab actually did day to day. The honest answer? Not much. File storage, Plex, backups, and a handful of containers. Nothing that needed multiple VMs, hypervisors, and powerful hardware running 24/7, racking up an expensive power bill. I wanted a self-contained, reliable set-up that could handle storage, automation, and media without requiring a full-blown server. A NAS fits that definition perfectly. It’s purpose-built for what I needed, and not what I might need. I have no plans of running a local LLM or need powerful AI-based object recognition. So, the idea of consolidating everything into one efficient system made sense. Fewer moving parts, fewer things to fix, less noise, less power consumption. Win-win.

Making the switch to a Synology NAS

A simple, straightforward setup

Since I already had an older Synology NAS, I knew the switch over would be fairly simple for me. I opted for a modern 4-bay Synology model for a few good reasons. The device strikes a good balance between simplicity and flexibility. It had proper RAID support, which I was already used to for media and photo backups, native apps for backups, built-in Docker support for the extras, and a web interface that made configuring and managing everything extremely simple. With an extra boost of power and tacked-on 8GB of RAM, the DS925 should suffice for my needs. Or so I hope.

The set-up was almost anticlimactic. I just popped in the drives, let DSM do its thing, and within minutes, everything was up and running. I migrated all my data, including photos and videos, from the old NAS and deployed a few containers. First up, Portainer for easier container management. Next, Home Assistant, Pi-Hole, a dashboard app, and some essentials like note-taking apps and more. That was it. It was honestly surprising how quickly I was able to set everything up. And no, it didn’t require figuring out any dependency issues or ideating on which NAS-oriented operating system to install.

But here’s where things get interesting. A week after switching, I’d been looking for gotchas. Slow-downs, crashes, and more. Nothing. The NAS sat quietly on my desk, performing more or less the same tasks I’d been doing before while sipping power and barely consuming any electricity. While my old setup felt like something I’d put together, the Synology works like an appliance. While the former had me worried that I might have missed something or done something that could break my setup, the Synology just works. In fact, the Synology NAS erased that mental load completely.

Like I mentioned earlier, the power savings are not to be ignored either. The NAS consumed just around 25 watts of power, which adds up over time, both in cost and heat emissions. The latter is important for a device sitting right next to me on a desk. I just don’t feel the need to blast the air conditioning as much. Of course, there are trade-offs to consider. If you plan to do things like run local LLMs on your home server, a NAS isn’t going to cut it. More advanced tasks like object recognition with security cameras won’t be feasible either. But, I’d wager a guess that neither of those is an everyday task. I run Docker containers, but only for things I actively use. By being more selective about how I use my NAS, I was able to switch over from a full-size server to a compact desktop NAS that barely takes up any space.

Turns out scaling down was actually an upgrade

As it turns out, shrinking my home lab wasn’t about giving up features. I just needed to refocus on what I needed from my server. I like the idea of a data center in my office, but I don’t need one. The efficiency, reliability, and simplicity gains of a NAS far outweigh the upvotes from running an enterprise setup in my home office. The NAS-server combo has been running smoothly ever since I set it up with little to no downtime and barely a blip on CPU and memory metrics. The experiment I started proved that sometimes less is more.