In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)

There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).

Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive

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odo1242 a day ago | parent | next [-]

(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)

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nickthegreek a day ago | parent | prev [-]

But its all under 1 roof and can be taken from you in a fire or be stolen?

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odo1242 a day ago | parent [-]

I mean it could also get dropped yea, sure. This is just a neutral discussion of the costs, I'm not making an argument for anything.

(As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation. I just like the idea of having a homelab.)

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nickthegreek a day ago | parent [-]

Ya, my setup still includes the google drive expense as that’s my offsite.

	▲	odo1242 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Nice, I see how that affects the cost benefit analysis for sure