Storage & Backup SeriesNew part
NAS and Storage Hardware
NAS boxes, CMR drives, and DIY builds for home storage, self-hosting, and Plex.
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Part 1 of 4
Best NAS for Home, Self-Hosting, and Plex (2026)
Picking a NAS in 2026 is a different decision than it was even two years ago. The brand that owned the home-NAS recommendation, Synology, spent the…
11 min read·Jun 2026
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2
Part 2 of 4
Best NAS Hard Drives for 2026: WD Red Pro vs Seagate IronWolf
Hard drives are the one NAS component you cannot cheap out on and the one that costs the most to get wrong. A bad drive choice…
10 min read·Jun 2026
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3
Part 3 of 4
CMR vs SMR Drives for NAS: Why SMR Wrecks RAID Rebuilds
Buy the wrong hard drive for a NAS and everything looks fine until the day a disk dies. Then you swap in a replacement, the array…
10 min read·Jun 2026
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4
Part 4 of 4
Build a DIY NAS with TrueNAS or Unraid on a Mini PC
Building a NAS yourself comes down to two decisions: what box to put it on, and whether to run TrueNAS or Unraid. Get those two right…
17 min read·Jun 2026