I tried Longhorn, and ended up concluding that it would not work reliably with Volsync. Volsync (for automatic volume restore on cluster rebuild) is a must for me.
I plan on installing Rook-Ceph. I’m also on 1Gb/s network, so it won’t be fast, but many fellow K8s home opsers are confident it will work.
Rook-ceph does need SSDs with Power Loss Protection (PLP), or it will get extremelly slow (latency). Bandwidth is not as much of an issue. Find some used Samsung PM or SM models, they aren’t expensive.
Longhorn isn’t fussy about consumer SSDs and has its own built-in backup system. It’s not good at ReadWriteMany volumes, but it sounds like you won’t need ReadWriteMany. I suggest you don’t bother with Rook-Ceph yet, as it’s very complex.
Also, join the Home Operations community if you have a Discord account, it’s full of k8s homelabbers.
The problem with non-PLP drives is that Rook-Ceph will insist that its writes get done in a way that is safe wrt power loss.
For regular consumer drives, that means it has to wait for the cache to be flushed, which takes aaaages (milliseconds!!) and that can cause all kinds of issues. PLP drives have a cache that is safe in the event of power loss, and thus Rook-Ceph is happy to write to cache and consider the operation done.
Again, 1Gb network is not a big deal, not using PLP drives could cause issues.
If you don’t need volsync and don’t need ReadWriteMany, just use Longhorn with its builtin backup system and call it a day.