From Google Drive Panic to My First Home Lab NAS
Around 2024, I was knee‑deep in my work as an Independent IT Consultant when the Google Drive alerts started again: “Storage almost full.” I’d clear space, only for it to fill back up. The cycle felt absurd — I was paying for cloud storage yet constantly hitting limits. That’s when I decided: what if I built my own storage instead of renting someone else’s? I’d never used a Raspberry Pi before, so this was a real jump into the unknown. After watching several tutorials, I landed on a project that kept appearing: Raspberry Pi 5 paired with the Radxa Penta SATA HAT . The idea was inspired by a Raspberry Pi 5 NAS video from Jeff Geerling , whose step‑by‑step approach showed how a tiny, low‑power board could become a compact NAS with multiple drives. To source the hardware, I turned to Robu.in , an official Raspberry Pi reseller and electronics hub in India. From there, I picked up the Raspberry Pi 5 , the Radxa Penta SATA HAT , and several 1TB SSDs , all at reasonable prices and with genu...