Other options are LUKS with Tang and Clevis, or LUKS with SSH and Dropbear.

Sorry, I have no details.

Edit: Tang/Clevis are local software and a network server that provide keys. If stolen, won’t boot.

SSH and Dropbear make it so you can login to provide keys.

What features do you want?

What should my first configurations and preparations

Write on paper your goals. Write on paper a list of your systems and what needs to speak with what.

Then pick the most important or simplest device and get it connected the way you want.

At home, colors Whatever color the purpose is.

Look up what system vendors will sell for that CPU. If they sell 256 GiB, then you are likely good.

I don’t find I ever upgrade after the first couple months. I would max it out or get multi CPU boards wherI cannot afford to max it out.

I tend to buy two at a time. Some are months old, others three years old.

Professionally, I have seen drives over 10 years always on at low utilization without issue. (The data was easily replaceable.)

crammed in to my case in a hideous way

Heat is a killer. Check them regularly.

Mainly, I’m wondering if I should migrate /home/ to my RAID array, or leave /home/ where it is and create a new directory on the RAID array.

Leave home where it is. Symlink to important directories on RAID.

Makes it easier to mess with the RAID if it doesn’t make logging in hard.

For roll your own, FreeBSD and ZFS on any old desktop with 4 SATA ports is pretty nice and cheap. Built in encryption, NFS, SMB services. Navidrome has install directions for serving music. Pretty secure by default.

I like reminding people that with every new technology, the old one is still around. The new gets most of the attention, but the old is still kicking. (We still have wire wrapped programs kicking around.)

You are all good. Spend your limited attention on other things.

Have you tried a restore? A non-differential smap snapshot should be fine, but differential snapshots would make a restore difficult to impossible.

A zfssend and zfsrestore with a differential snapshot would be more traditional. If one put mbuffer in the middle, it would even be fast.

Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

This question confuses me. Debian and Ubuntu can be setup to be NASes.

NAS is a description of a mid-level function that various software provide a part of.

Various file systems and volume managers can provide snapshots and rollbacks. To aid your research LVM, ZFS, and many others support snapshots.

There are various ways to then expose the formatted space to the network. To aid research NFS, SMB, and iSCSI are options.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful to someone.

I wonder if the specifics of the hack would make backing up elsewhere fail. Possibly by spreading the hack to new machines.

In any case, testing backups is important.

Also consider rubber feet.

Does the sound correspond to the power draw?

Power at idle and with Home Assistant running. I assume the noise is when the power draw is higher, but that is unclear.

To me, it sounds like the HDDs. What is anything is using them? Often raids will scan then entire disk at initial setup.

Baculum for Bacula https://www.bacula.lat/baculum/?lang=en

No. I do not suggest anyone do any of these.

Others have given the direct answer of “no”. Cheap is relative, so here are some options that assume a higher value of “cheap”.

DIY solar panels and DIY flywheel generator.

Professional solar panels on your dwelling and professional whole house battery storage. (Fix the issue by fixing a larger issue.)

Buy an electric car that can power the equipment. A Ford Lightning (there are other choices) in the garage, that never moves, will solve the issue of swapping batteries. Check junkyards for a used one.

Move closer to a power plant, while also ensuring a minimum power line distance.

Move closer to something with a very high up time requirement. (A hospital may have generators, but they may also have a requirement for their power to stay up nearly always.)

Use AWS or co-hosting to make power not your issue.