3 reasons why you should separate your NAS from your homelab
When I first built my homelab, I did what most people do—I put everything on one machine. My NAS, my services, my containers—all of it running on the same box . It made sense at the time: why buy two machines when one can do the job? But eventually, I started to see the issues this supposed "optimization" introduced. Here are the three main reasons I decided to separate my NAS from my homelab.
A NAS and a homelab aren't the same thing
One needs peace and quiet. The other needs room to make a mess
This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it's easy to miss in practice. A NAS has one job : store files and serve them to devices on your network. That's it—it doesn't need to do anything else.
A homelab is different . It's where you run services like Docker containers , virtual machines, self-hosted apps—whatever you're experimenting with this week. The whole point of a homelab is that it's powerful, constantly changing, and something you're always working on.
The same hardware can technically handle both a homelab and a NAS. But the moment you separate them, each has its own space to function in a more optimized fashion.
My NAS needs to be on 24/7—my homelab doesn't
One machine doing two jobs means paying the power bill for both
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
Think about what your NAS actually does overnight. Your phone syncs photos to it. A download manager finishes a job at 2 a.m. Your backup software runs its nightly job. If you have surveillance cameras, footage is constantly being written to it. None of this requires you to be awake or paying attention—it just needs the NAS to be there.
Your homelab services are a different story. No one's accessing Jellyfin or a dev environment at 3 a.m. Most homelab services have a pretty predictable usage window, and it usually overlaps with when you're home and awake.
When everything runs on one box, you can't act on this difference. Either everything stays on all night, or everything shuts off. You lose the ability to control each system independently.
This matters for power. A dedicated NAS idles at around 15–20W. A homelab server running real workloads can draw 80–150W or more, depending on your setup. Running everything on one box overnight means you're paying the homelab's power cost even when nothing on it is being used.
Having my homelab and NAS on the same box made me too conservative
You can't really experiment when your files are on the line
Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | Narmtey/Shutterstock
The biggest thing I noticed after separating the two was how much more freely I started experimenting on my homelab.
When your files live on the same machine you're tinkering with, you start second-guessing everything. You want to try a new container setup, but you pause—what if something goes sideways and file access goes down? You want to update the OS, but you hold off—it's not a great time for downtime. The homelab starts to feel less like a playground and more like something you have to handle carefully.
Once the NAS is in a separate box, that hesitation disappears. You can break things, rebuild them, try something stupid and roll it back—and your NAS doesn't care. Your files are still there, backups are still running, and everything that depends on your storage keeps working.
That freedom is kind of the whole point of having a homelab in the first place.
A homelab failure could take my storage down with it
When things break—your NAS shouldn't be collateral damage
Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | Anucha Cheechang/ Shutterstock
Apart from the risk of breaking your system through tinkering—you should also consider the times when things break due to happenstance. A bad update breaks a service. A container goes rogue. Something in the OS breaks. These mishaps—while not guaranteed—are more likely to happen in a homelab because it runs a lot of moving parts.
When your NAS is on the same box, all of that becomes your NAS's problem too. File access can go down, backups stop running, and anything on the network that depends on your storage just stops working. The worst part is that none of this has anything to do with your storage.
The same point applies to security. Homelabs often run services exposed to the internet—Jellyfin, Nextcloud, a VPN, and the like. If something on that side gets compromised , your files are immediately affected because they're on the same machine. That's a much bigger problem than a compromised service alone.
In contrast, a dedicated NAS sitting quietly on the network, doing nothing except serving files, has a small attack surface. It doesn't run your experimental containers. It doesn't have ports open for your homelab services. It's just a file server—and that simplicity is the whole point.
When keeping them together still makes sense
One box is a great starting point—it's just not a great ending point
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
If you're just starting out, one box is completely fine. Budget matters more than architecture when you're still figuring out how everything works, and there's real value in learning how it all fits together before you start thinking about separating the services.
The split starts to pay off once you're running enough services that the tension between "I want this to be stable" and "I want to experiment" actually shows up. When you catch yourself holding back on a homelab change because you don't want to risk your storage—that's the sign.
Treat them differently, and both get better at their jobs
A NAS is infrastructure. A homelab is a playground. Once I realized this and optimized my setup accordingly—keeping the NAS boring and stable while letting the homelab be whatever it needs to be—both got noticeably better at their jobs.
