Our Synology NAS is 15 years old. Fifteen. In tech years that’s somewhere between “vintage” and “archaeological find.” It’s full. It gets no updates. A misery.
For years, that was fine. We dumped our family photos there. The digital equivalent of a box in the attic labeled “misc.”
The phone problem
Meanwhile, my Google Pixel was in a permanent state of storage full. Always. The kind of full where you want to record your kid’s first bike ride and Android tells you to delete something first. And the moment was over. Pick a memory to sacrifice so you can make a new one, so to speak.
So I’d spend some Saturdays doing what every responsible parent/nerd does: manually copying videos and photos off the phone onto some external hard drive. Manually, like cavemen did, you know.
Technically saved, but not accessible. Fifteen years of family memories scattered across folders that only I could find. I felt embarrassed about that.
I have been building enterprise business software for a living my entire career. Automating things. Yet there I was, plugging a cable into my phone to copy paste images to a NAS that doesn't get any updates.
The line I wouldn’t cross
I know what you’re thinking. “Just turn on Google Photos backup. Problem solved.”
I know. I know. And I gave up fighting Google on almost everything else. Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Search. They won. Fine. I’m not going to pretend I run a degoogled phone. I don’t.
But for some reason, I could not bring myself to flip that switch for Photos. All those photos of my kids, family vacations, embarrassing videos we’d never post anywhere. Uploaded, analyzed, stored on servers I don’t control.
Everything else, sure. But not this. This was the line. With the new administration in charge across the ocean, the urge to escape Google, at least for the rest of our digital lives, started to become more serious.
Time for a proper server
At some point I’d had enough. I decided: it’s time for a real server at home. I was done with consumer NAS boxes that lock you into proprietary software and stop getting updates after a few years.
I’m a software engineer. I’ve been building PCs since my youth. The answer was obvious: an x86 Ubuntu server. Something I could use as data storage and run services on. At that time I also had this dream of running local LLMs in the basement. Because if you’re going to build a server, you might as well dream big.
The build (on paper)
I spent some amount of time picking the “right” components. The goal: enough power to be useful, low enough idle consumption to not feel guilty leaving it on 24/7. Germany’s electricity prices are not kind to hobby projects.
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G. 16GB RAM. 1TB system SSD. Two 2TB SSDs in RAID 1 for data. Noctua cooler. be quiet! PSU. Mini-ITX form factor, so we could potentially put it in the living room in a nice case instead of banishing it to the basement. Total idle power: somewhere between 17 and 26 watts.
At German electricity rates (€0.38/kWh), that’s roughly €70 per year to keep it running. I told myself: “Well, let’s just pretend this is a hobby too. A learning experience.” That’s what we tell ourselves when the spreadsheet says “this makes no financial sense whatsoever.”
The hesitation
Everything was in the cart. ~€900 total.
I didn’t click “Buy.”
Because €900 is a lot of money for what is basically a fancy NAS. Yes, it could run services. Yes, I planned to run LLMs on it. But the Ryzen 5 5600G with 16GB of RAM was never going to be an LLM machine. It would solve the photo storage problem and nothing else. And €900 for photo storage felt steep, even with the “it’s a hobby” justification.
The plot twist
January came. Post-Christmas. I was finally annoyed enough to pull the trigger. Opened the saved cart.
The price had gone up roughly 35%. RAM and SSD prices had gone through “the” bout of insanity. What was €900 was now closer to €1,200.
I regretted I hadn’t ordered in November.
Today? I couldn’t be happier that I didn’t.
What I actually wanted
What I didn’t want to admit during all those thinking sessions: I wanted to run LLMs in my basement. The NAS was just the excuse. And as a software engineer, I knew that’s where things were about to get interesting.
The Ryzen build would have been fine for storage. But “fine for storage” wasn’t the dream. The dream was a machine to automate stuff at home to make our lives more livable with our kids. Store the family photos, run local AI, host services, and still sit quietly in the corner drawing less power than a light bulb.
That machine exists. It’s just not an x86 Linux box.
Next up: I Bought a used Mac Studio to Run Local LLMs. Why I ended up with Apple Silicon instead.