I bought myself a home NAS server for christmas, and was ready to upgrade it to run a bunch of services I wanted for my files and media. I went for the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus - NAS-Server. It looks good, is small enough to fit on my desk and reviews seems good. Also picked it up on black friday last year for about 6000 NOK. I planned to upgrade the hardware a bit, adding some disks, M.2s, and better ram about 32GB. Which was reasonable at the time. Install TrueNas instead of the standard ugreen os.
Then shit hit the fan and prices went up and my joy went down. I was looking at buying the following:
- 2x WD Red Plus WD80EFPX 256MB 8TB - Before prices went up: 2700 NOK each. After: 3800 NOK
- 2x WD Red SN700 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB - Before prices went up: 1200 NOK each. After: 3000 NOK
- 2x Kingston Fury Impact SO-DIMM DDR5 4800MHz 16GB - Before prices went up: 590 NOK. After 3100 NOK
(prices are at the time of writing 14.01.2026)
So the extra investment for my NAS server (already 6000 NOK), was only going to be about 8980 NOK (which was going to be overkill, might have skipped the extra M.2), was now going to be 19800 NOK. That was just insane.
Before total: 14980 NOK. After total: 258000 NOK.
Why my own server?
Wanted to get away from all the subscriptions, having to rely on big tech for personal data and media, wanted my own playground for services and homelabbing, wanted to get away from the quote:
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.
To have my pictures and memories that are now scattered throughout messenger, icloud, google, snapchat and whatever that might be taken away at any time. And even let my family join in saving them to my server, ready to be backed up on disk, physical disks, and printed out into physical pictures (the best ones). To not have the 4-5 streaming services for movies, videos and music, or having to unsub and sub every month or whatever to avoid having stale subscription and throwing away money.
In Norway we had something called leilending, a person who leased land to work the farm and soil. Not owning it, but working it. The system lasted from the 800s-900s all the way to the 1800s. Leilendingar paid annual ground rent (landskyld) to the landowners, plus entrance fees and confirmation fees every three years. They tilled the land, grew the crops, lived on it, managed whole farms even, but the land itself belonged to someone else. They were above laborers but below the self-owning farmers.
When voting rights came around in 1814, only those who owned property were allowed to vote. Initially only 7-8% of the male population qualified. People got creative though, buying worthless marshland just to meet the property requirements, they called them myrmann (bog men). Voting rights weren’t universal for men until 1898.
I store my photos on someone else’s servers, work my files in someone else’s infrastructure, pay rent for the space and compute. The terms can change whenever they want.
Why oh why
There’s a memory shortage happening right now. NAND prices are up 246% from Q1 2025, with most of that increase happening in the last two months. Some RAM prices doubled month-over-month. HDDs are also up to their highest point in 2 years.
Numbers are that correct they seem like more.
Memory manufacturers are reallocating capacity to make higher-margin AI server memory instead of consumer products. The demand from AI data centers is pulling supply away from the consumer market.
Project Stargate was announced in January 2025. It’s a $500 billion investment by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX to build AI infrastructure in the US by 2029. They’ve already deployed over $100 billion in the first year. Five new data center sites were announced recently, bringing total planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts.
Prices will not likely be ok before around late 2027 maybe.
So what
I can’t just sit here with my server without any disks and wait and continue to pay for compute and media I wont own. I hope for a sale. Second hand market is no good, price increased there aswell and I don’t really trust it. I think I have to bite the bullet.