Nivel 1

Your files are yours again

Stop paying rent on your own photos.

Your photos, your documents and your backups on a machine in your house, with the phone app uploading on its own the way Google Photos does. And with one difference: nobody is going to raise the price or close the account.

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What you put on it: Debian + Docker, with Immich for photos and Samba for files. Or OpenMediaVault if you would rather manage it from a browser.
Spending order: Around $320 to $750, depending on how many drives and what size.

What you keep even if you sell the hardware

What you learn at this level

That RAID is not a backup. It is the most expensive lesson in the homelab and it is almost always learned by losing something.
The 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two different media, one off site.
File permissions on Linux, which is where everybody gets stuck in the first week.
Reading a drive's SMART: the health the disk carries inside and almost nobody looks at until it has already died.

The classic mistake at this level

Believing that because there are two drives there is a backup. An array saves you from ONE drive dying. It does not save you from deleting the folder by accident, from ransomware, or from the house burning down. It is availability, not backup, and they are different things.

And now, what with

The parts

These come last on purpose: first what for, then what with. The price ranges are there to give your wallet a sense of scale, not to be believed — the real price is what you see when you open the link.

Mini PC with Intel N100 or N150

Beelink

It draws as much as a light bulb (10-15 W), runs twenty containers without breaking a sweat and decodes video in hardware, which is what matters once you get to Jellyfin. It is the most repeated part in the 2026 homelab for a reason.

Price range: MX$3,500 – MX$6,000

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4 TB NAS hard drive (CMR)

Seagate IronWolf

CMR, not SMR. An SMR drive in an array takes days to rebuild and sometimes gives up half-way. It is why the part number is what gets checked here, not the colour of the box.

Price range: MX$2,200 – MX$3,200

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External enclosure for two 3.5-inch drives

A mini PC has nowhere to put big drives. This enclosure solves the whole of level 1 without changing machine. Make sure it has its own power supply: USB alone is not enough for 3.5-inch drives.

Price range: MX$1,200 – MX$2,500

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1 TB NVMe for the system

Crucial

The system and the services' databases go here; the big files on the spinning drives. Mixing them makes everything feel slow.

Price range: MX$1,200 – MX$2,000

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External drive for the off-site copy

This one does NOT live plugged in. It is the copy you take to a relative's house. Without it there is no backup, there is one copy with extra steps.

Price range: MX$1,800 – MX$2,800

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What to know before these brands

ASUS
If you already have one and it works, do not throw it out: uncertified does not mean it does not work. It means that if something in Linux breaks with the next update, no manufacturer is obliged to fix it.
Quién lo dice · Counted on ubuntu.com/certified/laptops on 25 Aug 2026: zero results for ASUS, for Zenbook and for Vivobook. Notebookcheck documents the wifi variants by region; linux-hardware.org records both chips under the same commercial name. On graphics cards the bar is different and it clears it: TechPowerUp measured the TUF RX 9070 XT's cooler as «the most powerful cooler of all the cards tested so far», with very good noise in its quiet BIOS.
Western Digital
It has no DRAM: it uses WD's own four-channel Polaris 3 controller, designed to work without it. That matters here because the drive it replaced was ruled out for being «QLC and DRAM-less», and this one fixes the first thing, not the second. What saves it is that it is TLC and that its cache covers almost the whole drive.
Quién lo dice · TechPowerUp measured the 2 TB SN7100 as «the fastest Gen 4 SSD we have ever tested», with Kioxia 218-layer BiCS8 TLC memory. Tom's Hardware agrees on what matters and qualifies the rest: record low power draw and surprising random reads, but only modest sustained performance against other PCIe 4.0 drives.

When this gets too small for you

Nivel 2: The household services