Storage

Even the most elegant cluster needs a solid place to keep its stuff. Here’s how storage is set up in my homelab:

Hardware

A Synology DS224+ serves as the primary storage backend. It’s reliable, compact, and fits into a home setup without sounding like a jet engine. The system runs two 4TB disks in RAID 1, so a single-disk failure doesn’t mean data loss.

Provisioning

Storage is connected via iSCSI, with dynamic volume provisioning handled by the Synology CSI driver. The synology-iscsi-storage StorageClass is set as the cluster default—so any PersistentVolumeClaim that doesn’t specify a StorageClass gets a Synology iSCSI volume automatically. No manual tinkering every time a new service comes online.

Filesystem

Volumes are formatted as ext4.

Talos Linux doesn’t ship the btrfs kernel module, so BTRFS isn’t an option without custom kernel extensions. Ext4 is a reliable, well-supported choice that works out of the box with the Synology CSI driver on Talos.

Retention Policy

PersistentVolumes use the Retain reclaim policy. This means that deleting a PVC does not automatically delete the underlying iSCSI volume on the NAS—useful insurance against accidental data loss during Flux reconciliation.