SAN vs NAS for your home lab: which used storage to buy

If you're building out a home lab and need shared storage, you'll eventually hit the SAN vs NAS question. Both solve "storage that multiple machines can reach," but they do it differently — and the wrong choice will haunt your weekend troubleshooting sessions for years.

This guide focuses on used/refurbished enterprise gear, which is where the real value is. New prosumer NAS appliances are fine, but for $300–600 you can run production-grade hardware that Fortune 500 companies retired last year.

The core difference (no hand-waving)

NAS (Network Attached Storage) presents storage as a file system over the network. Your clients talk SMB (Windows), NFS (Linux/VMware), or AFP (old Macs). The NAS owns the filesystem; clients just see folders. Think of it as a file server with a good OS baked in.

SAN (Storage Area Network) presents raw block devices over the network (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or NVMe-oF). Clients see a disk — or something that looks exactly like one — and they manage their own filesystem on top of it. The SAN has no idea what's inside the blocks.

This distinction drives almost every practical difference between them.

When NAS makes sense for a home lab

Use NAS when your primary use case is file sharing or backup targets:

• Media server (Plex, Jellyfin) pulling files from a central library
• Time Machine / rsync backup destination
• Docker volumes that are mostly config + small data
• Shared project folders across dev machines

Used NAS hardware worth looking at

Synology DS1821+ — if you want appliance simplicity, the DS1821+ is the gold standard. But it's not cheap even used. An alternative is to build a DIY NAS on a used Dell PowerEdge R230 or similar — TrueNAS Scale runs great on it, you get ECC RAM, and the IPMI is a life-saver for remote management.

QNAP TS-h886 — uses ZFS natively, 10GbE ports included, can handle iSCSI if you later need it. Used units show up regularly.

For NFS performance in a VMware or Proxmox environment, you want at minimum 1GbE between NAS and hypervisor. 10GbE is worth it if you plan to store VM disks there — you'll feel the difference during live migrations.

What to check before buying a used NAS

• Drive bays count and whether it supports the form factor you need (3.5" vs 2.5" vs M.2)
• RAM expandability — ZFS loves RAM; some units are soldered
• NIC speed — many budget NAS boxes ship 1GbE only, 10GbE adapters for them are sometimes proprietary
• Firmware support — Synology especially locks down OS versions by model
• Fan noise — some units designed for quiet office use are genuinely acceptable; rackmount NAS gear is loud

When SAN makes sense for a home lab

Use SAN when your use cases involve:

• Hypervisor shared storage for live VM migration (vMotion, Proxmox live migration)
• High IOPS workloads — databases, write-intensive apps
• Multi-host clustering — shared disk presented to a cluster for failover

iSCSI SAN is the practical choice for home labs because it runs on standard Ethernet and you don't need a dedicated FC switch. FC is worth learning if you can acquire the gear cheaply, but the SFP+ fiber infrastructure adds complexity and cost.

Used SAN hardware worth looking at

Dell EMC PowerVault MD3420 / MD3820f — direct-attach SAS storage, can be repurposed with a used RAID controller. Not technically a SAN but bridges the gap.

HP MSA 2040 / 2050 — dual-controller iSCSI/FC SAN. These show up at good prices once hardware refresh cycles hit. They support 10GbE iSCSI natively with the right SFPs.

NetApp FAS2554 / FAS2650 — ONTAP is a serious enterprise OS; the learning curve pays off if you ever touch NetApp at work. These units can do both NFS and iSCSI simultaneously, which gives you flexibility.

IBM DS3500 / DS4700 — solid workhorse for iSCSI. Less common now, but spares are still around.

What to check before buying used SAN gear

• Controller firmware version — on dual-controller units, both controllers must be on the same firmware version or you'll get mysterious I/O errors
• Cache battery / supercapacitor status — write-back cache is disabled if the backup power unit is dead; performance tanks
• Port type — 8Gb FC vs 16Gb FC vs 10GbE iSCSI matters. Make sure your HBAs or NICs match
• Expansion shelf compatibility — if you buy a head unit expecting to add shelves, verify the shelf-to-controller compatibility matrix before buying
• Noise and power draw — dual-controller SANs are datacenter hardware. Budget 200–400W idle and significant fan noise

The hybrid option: software-defined storage

Before spending money on dedicated hardware, consider running TrueNAS Scale or Ceph on existing servers. TrueNAS Scale can serve NFS, SMB, and iSCSI from the same pool. Ceph is complex but extremely powerful for multi-node setups.

A used Dell R720 or HP DL380 Gen9 with a bunch of drives inside, running TrueNAS, covers 80% of home lab storage needs without a dedicated storage appliance.

The trade-off is management overhead and the fact that your storage host is also burning CPU.

Speed expectations on real gear

iSCSI latency is typically 200–500 µs over 10GbE on decent hardware. NFS adds overhead from the protocol stack. Neither approaches local NVMe, but for home lab workloads both are more than adequate.

My recommendation

• Start with NAS (TrueNAS on an old server, or a used Synology/QNAP) unless you specifically need live VM migration or block storage clustering.
• Add iSCSI SAN when you run Proxmox or ESXi clusters and need shared block storage.
• Don't buy FC infrastructure unless you're using it to learn for a job that requires it — the additional cost and complexity of HBAs and fiber switches is hard to justify.

If you want tested and reset gear without the lottery of eBay auctions, resellers like IT and Office stock used enterprise NAS and storage hardware with basic checks done — worth browsing before you commit to a blind buy from a surplus pallet.

What's your current storage setup? Are you running a software-defined solution like TrueNAS or Ceph, or did you go the dedicated appliance route? Curious what workloads pushed you toward SAN vs NAS in the end.