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Building a powerful and reliable homelab often hinges on one critical component: storage. Whether you're setting up a robust Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution using TrueNAS or unRAID, creating a virtualization powerhouse with Proxmox, or simply need to connect more drives than your motherboard allows, a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card is frequently the answer.

But navigating the world of HBAs can seem daunting at first, with talk of SAS vs. SATA, IT mode vs. IR mode, different port types, and various chipsets. Getting it wrong can lead to compatibility headaches, performance bottlenecks, or limitations on your future expansion plans.

This guide is designed to cut through the confusion. We'll walk you through everything you need to know to confidently select the perfect HBA for your homelab needs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts, break down the key specifications to consider, highlight popular and reliable models favored by the homelab community, and touch on essential installation steps like firmware flashing and cable selection. By the end, you'll be equipped to choose an HBA that unlocks the full storage potential of your server.

Have you ever found yourself staring at a server, knowing you need more storage but dreading the cost and complexity of adding more host bus adapters? Running out of space is a common problem, and thankfully, there's a neat solution you might not have considered: SAS expanders.

A SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) expander is a hardware device that significantly increases the number of SAS and SATA drives connected to a single SAS port on your host controller. Think of it as a multiplier for your storage connectivity. In this post, we'll dive into what SAS expanders are, how they work to extend your server's capabilities, and the basic considerations for using them effectively. Whether building a high-density storage solution or simply trying to maximise your existing infrastructure, understanding SAS expanders can unlock new possibilities for your data storage needs.

If you are running Unraid, I think there’s a fair chance you may be storing some media files (or “Linux ISOs” as commonly called by the Homelab community) on your server that could be transcoded or converted into different encodings. This could be done by dedicated CLI tools or apps or, more commonly, by applications that may convert these in real-time, like media server apps Plex or JellyFin. These tools may be able to use a spare GPU you have lying around to allow you to use that GPU compute to assist in the media encoding and decoding process, speed up the process and possibly free up compute on your CPU as that work is offloaded!

Unraid as a NAS OS provides an easy way to use old hardware for some network-attached storage. However, including docker can also be a great way to get network-attached computing by running docker containers on the host. But we want to do this with something other than just the included web console; management of containers can get tedious and make each container a bit of a snowflake rather than a repeatable deployable resource that will behave the same each time it’s deployed.

In this post, you will learn how to set up and use Ansible on an Unraid host to manage resources more efficiently and apply Infrastructure as Code to your Unraid system. With Ansible, you’ll also learn how to operate and configure just containers or use docker-compose stacks for more complex container needs and use Ansible’s templating engine to the fullest.