In Episode 4 of my “Building a Homelab” series, I finally tackle the thing everybody needs but nobody wants to price out: storage. A homelab doesn’t have to be a rack full of gear—start with what you’ve got—but sooner or later you’re going to accumulate a ridiculous amount of data. Movies, music, backups, ISOs, VM disks, and now with the whole LLM/“AI” wave (yeah, you and I know better), you’re going to generate even more. In this video I walk through the two storage approaches I actually use: a Synology NAS for centralized storage and a Synology FlashStation for fast SSD-backed shared storage. I show how I structure my shares (SMB for media, NFS for Proxmox, and iSCSI mainly for Windows), why shared storage can be a failure point, and how I isolate NFS shares per Proxmox host to avoid ID collisions and potential corruption. Then I talk about “Big Bertha”—my 4U Supermicro box that holds 36 drives—and why I’m using it as a ZFS playground instead of my primary storage. I’ll even eat a little crow: I’ve been a vocal non-fanboy of ZFS for years, but my eyes have been opened on data protection and performance.