I’ve had a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole for a couple years now, and I’ll always have one from now on. I’ve heard there may be some issues with encryted DNS, but no doubt the open source community will figure out a solution.

I’ve also been setting up more self-hosted services on my home network, and some of them I don’t actually want to open up to the internet. They all have internet access (for the most part), but I cannot access the services outside of my home network. This has been okay, but then I installed Nextcloud. I really wanted a way to access that data on the go, but I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to put my Nextcloud outside of the home firewall yet.

I bought the Quad SATA Hat after watching a review of it from NovaSpirit Tech on Youtube. It took me a while to get the raid5 array set up, but it appears to be working after going through the process a couple times. Looking back, additional research before getting started would have been useful.

I used four 1 TB 2.5" WD Red NAS drives connected to the hat, and it makes a nice little package when all assembled. I decided to go with a raid5 array to provide some redundancy in case of drive failure.