Editing Storage (section)

== Introduction ==
[[File:storageicon.png|125px|border|right|You may want an image here!]]There are so many ways to skin a cat when it comes to homelabbing, and one of the areas which often causes the most discussion and indecision is often what storage to use. The main reason for this is quite simply that there are ''so many choices''! On top of that, if you don't deal with storage on a day-to-day basis, there can be a bewildering array of [[Jargon Buster|jargon and terms]] to get your head around before you start to configure it.

One thing you can be reasonably sure of, is that actually most of the options are perfectly valid in their own ways, and you probably can't make a bad decision, after all you are not looking for Tier 0 production performance and resilience here, it's a homelab! Also, even if you change your mind, it's usually possible to reuse drives in a different configuration if your original storage design no longer meets your requirements.

The main questions you need to ask yourself when designing your homelab storage are:
*How much storage do I need?
*How fast does my storage need to be?
*What will my storage growth rate likely be over the next 1-3 years?
*Will I storage any non-lab data on there (e.g. photos, music, CCTV footage, etc)?
*How do I protect my data (if at all)?
*Do I need VAAI support?
*Do I care about storage protocol, and if so, why?
*What is my budget?!
* Do I want something which can do native replication, or am I happy to do this at a software / hypervisor level?
* How close to a real environment do I want this to look?