Every time I mention how much storage I have at home, someone inevitably asks what I use it for or comments how big my porn stash must be. So, this post sets out the whys and hows of my rather vast home storage system.

As of 2013-08-04 I have 32.86 TiB of storage in my home server, with a relatively luxurious (for me) 16.28 TiB free.

Pretty pie chart

The pie chart above is an accurate breakdown of what I use my storage for. The categories are:

Archive

Miscellaneous old things, images of relatives’ hard disks, stuff I’m keeping for posterity. A sort of backup, essentially.

Backups

Current backups of things across my various machines.

Media

Movies, music, etc…

OS

Working files for the OS on the server and other machines that boot off the server (over Fibre Channel for example).

Private

Things I don’t want others to see. Mostly archives of pre-release Apple software (for which I’m a tester), but to keep the pron crowd happy, this is where my stash lives. There, now you know.

VMs

Virtual machines that run on my server. Kind of fits under the OS category really but it was interesting to split it out.

Fibre Channel

Or for those who don’t know how to spell: Fiber Channel. I bought some 4Gbps fibre channel HBAs off eBay some time ago, and use FC at home to boot my desktop and some other machines on my network. I use a QLogic QLE2464 in my server with the SCSI target software built-in to Linux 3.5+ kernels, and a mixture of QLogic QLE2460 and other HBAs in my various machines.

Why? Because I can, and it’s a lot easier to get working than iSCSI.

So there, now you have it. Now get off my lawn!