I recently went down the rabbit hole of modernizing my home office setup, which included upgrading my workstation from a single RTX 3080 with 8GB of VRAM to dual RTX 3090’s with a total of 48GB of VRAM (ie. the “budget friendly” ML workstation setup). With more and more models becoming freely available, it’s super exciting to finally get to a state where I can run a really sophisticated workflow right from my home computer in a completely off-line environment.
My desktop has 4TB of SSD storage in it, but I always wanted to add a NAS to my local network and high-speed storage to my workstation that would allow me to download any datasets or models without consideration for available disk storage. For scale, a single image generation model such as Flux will take over 20GB of storage and a standard LLM I run on my desktop can eat over 40GB constrained by the 48GB of VRAM I have across both GPU’s.
The Build
TERRAMASTER D6-320 External Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps Type-C HDD Storage Hot Swappable Plug and Play (Diskless)
HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5-Inch Data Center HDD - WUH721414ALE604 0F31152 (Renewed)
Configuration
- Raid 6 (49TB out of 84TB available storage to cover up to two drive failures)
- Smartd disk monitoring
- Samba SMB share on network
When I started the configuration was fairly basic and I left the Terramaster directly connected to my workstation. I quickly realized that because I dual boot my workstation it would be best to use one of my small linux servers to manage the storage and instead connect my workstation to it through a 10 gig switch for fast file transfers. This gives me the ability to share the drive broadly on my network over wifi, while being able to transfer large files very quickly through a directly switched network.
Networking
I dual boot my desktop across both Linux and Windows, but primarily run ML workloads under Linux and game or 3D model under Windows. Booting between operating systems while trying to access the same attached drive became problematic because of disk formats so I decided to move to a more flexible setup that would give me the best of both worlds.
Cat 6 Ethernet Cable 5 ft 5 Pack
TRENDnet 6-Port 10G Switch, 4 x 2.5G RJ-45 Base-T Ports, 2 x 10G RJ-45 Ports, 60Gbps Switching Capacity, Wall Mountable, 10 Gigabit Network Connections, Lifetime Protection, Black, TEG-S762
I happened to have a Geekom mini PC lying around that I purchased for $600 a year ago. It has specs far beyond what I would’ve chosen. I’d consider something in the low $200 range.
This setup allows me to directly wire the mini-PC to the TerraMaster and expose an SMB network shared drive over wireless and a private hardwired network with the ML workstation.
This was also a great opportunity to spend more time with the Warp Terminal product. It was a massive accelerant for the setup. It’s been years since I have built a raid while I work on distributed cloud systems mainly. I was able to not only get the raid6 configured with monitoring, but was able to experiment with other tools such as snapraid that my Dad recommended. I ended up opting for a traditional raid6 setup, but the flexibility to experiment quickly made the project an even better learning experience.