It is excessive time I sorted out my residence server mess. I take advantage of a few historic desktop PCs in a closet full of laborious drives, and all the pieces is patched collectively, so I’ve someplace to retailer all of my stuff.
I additionally understand I do not want a NAS designed for enterprise velocity and a number of customers connecting to it directly, however I do want to save lots of as a lot cash as humanly attainable. It is simply my spouse and me right here, storing footage or music together with the occasional doc that may’t get misplaced. A Raspberry Pi and some laborious drives are precisely what I want, and Black Friday is the time to get all of it.
This is what I must construct a NAS
You may want a Raspberry Pi to run all the pieces. A mannequin 4 can work, however the newer mannequin 5 is so much higher. We do not want extreme velocity, however no one desires to make issues slower on objective. Until you have already got one up and working, purchase a package. It can include the board itself, an influence provide, a case with warmth sinks and a fan, and extras like an SD card and cables. You are going to avoid wasting cash this fashion.
This one has all of it, and it is on sale for an excellent worth.
Seize your self a powered USB Sort-A hub, too. A Raspberry Pi is tiny and does not have a strong energy management circuit, so working all the pieces from the Pi’s inside USB energy is not an excellent concept. Utilizing a powered hub means you are not going to see points copying information backwards and forwards as a result of there is not sufficient juice to go round.
Subsequent is someplace to place the storage. I am 3D printing an enclosure for all the pieces and utilizing particular person SATA to USB cables, however a drive dock is so much simpler. You may join a number of storage drives utilizing one USB cable, which might add as much as a ton of storage.
Shopping for one thing like this one from MAIWO means you possibly can combine and match 2.5 and three.5-inch drives, and there is even a built-in drive cloning characteristic for while you determine to go larger.
When all is claimed and performed you will have this dock and your Raspberry Pi case beside it so you will not want a lot room for all of it.
With room for 4 laborious drives, you are going to want no less than one. Most individuals select spinning disk drives moderately than solid-state drives for storage as a result of they’ve larger capacities and price much less. Since you are not making an attempt to run purposes from the drive, velocity is not as vital, and the cost-benefit makes it nicely definitely worth the trade-off.
I already purchased some 12TB drives over the summer season as a result of I knew I used to be going to do that, however to get began these 6TB drives are nice. The Black Friday sale worth cannot be beat, both.
Whether or not you spend $150 bucks on a Raspberry Pi and HDD dock or $500 on a NAS from an organization like Synology you are going to have to purchase the laborious drives.
Placing it collectively is straightforward. Observe a web-based information to get your Raspberry Pi up and working as soon as you’ve got put the package collectively. Join the USB hub to the Pi and a wall socket, join the HDD bay to the Hub and a wall socket, plug in your drives, and switch all of it on.
You do not want any particular NAS software program as a result of all the pieces you should share a drive throughout your private home community (or the web!) is constructed into the Raspberry Pi’s working system.
Use an on-line tutorial to arrange Samba for sharing, and be sure to thoughts your permissions. As soon as that is performed, your information and folders saved in your home made NAS will present up by the usual Home windows, Mac, and iOS “information” software, and there are many Android file apps that may hook up with network-shared storage.
After all, you possibly can go a step additional and arrange one thing like Plex or a network-aware music participant on the Raspberry Pi and do extra than simply retailer stuff. You may even set up OMV, a NAS working system on the Pi, and get all of the options you will discover on costly fashions, too.
Take pleasure in doing it your self and saving a boatload of cash. I do ☺️.
