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?
I’d recommend ZFS for most home server/NAS scenarios. Gives you everything you need, and nothing you don’t.
Stuff like Ceph is just as hungry as it is powerful. The performance sweet spot for Ceph barely begins at 5 dedicated nodes (with at least a dozen drives each, ideally). I could never recommend it for home use unless you want to run it in a lab for the sake of learning.
Source: I’ve designed/built/deployed several 1PB+ Ceph clusters over the last ~5yrs.