Custom home server built from spare parts
A hobbyist built a six-bay encrypted home NAS from spare parts, noting AI data centers have driven hard drive and DRAM prices up.
The author repurposed a Zotac MAGNUS EN1070K with a 3D-printed drive extension housing six 8 TB WD Red Plus drives in a 43.7 TB raw RAIDZ2 pool, plus an ESP32-S3 touchscreen status panel. The post is primarily a homelab build story covering thermals, encryption, and TrueNAS. It briefly notes that AI data center demand has left Western Digital hard drive production sold out for 2026 and roughly doubled DRAM and NAND contract prices in a single quarter.
- 43.7 TB raw RAIDZ2 pool built from second-hand 8 TB WD Red Plus drives.
- AI data center demand cited for sold-out WD drives and doubled DRAM/NAND prices.
From the original article
7 min read at asmat.ca
Google nagged me into this, along with every other enshittified cloud provider dealer. For about a year, my phone warned me that the account was nearly full, so I migrated the picture backups to a Nextcloud instance and freed the space, at which point the nagging switched to reminding me that backups were turned off. Gmail does the same and provides helpful "Upgrade" buttons here and there.
By sotilrac · asmat.ca
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.