Categories
Storage & NAS
Understand ZFS, RAID, filesystems and NAS operating systems. Learn how to plan capacity, protect against drive failure, and get the most reliable storage for your budget.
In this category
How to Build Your First NAS
A step-by-step guide to planning and building a reliable DIY NAS with TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault.
RAID Explained for Home Servers
Understand RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10, what they protect against, and why RAID is not a backup.
Comparisons
TrueNAS vs OpenMediaVault
TrueNAS vs OpenMediaVault: ZFS, hardware requirements, ease of use and which NAS OS fits your build.
Synology vs DIY NAS
Synology vs building your own NAS: cost, performance, software, flexibility and which route suits you.
Software
Glossary
NAS(Network-Attached Storage)
A dedicated storage device connected to your network that lets multiple devices store and access files centrally.
RAID(Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
A method of combining multiple drives so they act as one, improving performance and/or protecting against drive failure.
ZFS
An advanced filesystem and volume manager offering data integrity, snapshots, compression and software RAID.
SMB(Server Message Block)
A network file-sharing protocol used by Windows, macOS and Linux to access shared folders.
NFS(Network File System)
A Unix-native network file-sharing protocol offering high performance between Linux systems.
iSCSI
A protocol that presents remote storage over the network as if it were a local block device.
Btrfs
A modern Linux filesystem with snapshots, checksums and built-in RAID-like features.
ext4
The default, rock-solid Linux filesystem used by most distributions.
Samba
The Linux implementation of the SMB protocol, used to share files with Windows, macOS and Linux.
Compression
Encoding data to take up less space, often transparently at the filesystem level.
Checksum
A small fingerprint of data used to detect corruption or verify integrity.
Bit Rot
The slow, silent corruption of stored data over time due to hardware imperfections.
JBOD(Just a Bunch of Disks)
A group of drives exposed individually, without hardware RAID combining them.