I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don’t want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab’s scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
Ha, I went down the whole Ceph and Longhorn path as well, then ended up with hostPath and btrfs. Glad I’m not the only one who considers the former options too much of a headache after fully evaluating them.