Raspberry Pie NAS

[Guest]

Is it possible to make a raspberry pie into a NAS using external hard drives or using Internal hard drives and using a Small Power supply to power them.

[Cryosec]

yes it is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. USB ports and ethernet share the same bandwith so a data transfer would be slow

[Jsmith2211]

2 minutes ago, Mibzy said:

Is it possible to make a raspberry pie into a NAS using external hard drives or using Internal hard drives and using a Small Power supply to power them.

If you can find a sata hat and a version of OMV that will run on it then go ahead, but dont even bother trying freenas, it wont work

[Master Disaster]

Just now, Cryosec said:

yes it is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. USB ports and ethernet share the same bandwith so a data transfer would be slow

It works fine for a small home setup, my Pi can share a 720p video to 3 machines simultaneously with no issues.

[njmyers3]

It's possible, but not practical. It only has USB 2.0 and the ethernet port is on the same controller, so the max theoretical speed you would achieve is 12MB/s but in reality, it will be lower.

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, Joelsome said:

If you can find a sata hat and a version of OMV that will run on it then go ahead, but dont even bother trying freenas, it wont work

There's a Pi build of OMV, it works perfectly.

[jj9987]

If you would have searched, you might have found multiple topics that say it isn't really recommended. Raspberry Pi is very limited bandwidth-wise.

[Cryosec]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

It works fine for a small home setup, my Pi can share a 720p video to 3 machines simultaneously with no issues.

I won't deny that, as I said it is possible. If OP is fine with a limited bandwith, then absolutely no problem

[Jsmith2211]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Why would you do that when PiNas exists?

does it? Oh... i didnt know. i run an OMV nas with a dual core and 6TiB of data so... never realy had the need to reserch into pinas OSes.

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Joelsome said:

does it? Oh... i didnt know. i run an OMV nas with a dual core and 6TiB of data so... never realy had the need to reserch into pinas OSes.

Sorry my mistake. PiNas was the name of the website, it's OMV my Pi 3 is running.

[Jsmith2211]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Sorry my mistake. PiNas was the name of the website, it's OMV my Pi 3 is running.

oh wow lol. I use OMV with the Nginx plugin and it serves media to my family and my website to the world!

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Sorry my mistake. PiNas was the name of the website, it's OMV my Pi 3 is running.

Ok thanks.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

If you would have searched, you might have found multiple topics that say it isn't really recommended. Raspberry Pi is very limited bandwidth-wise.

Yes but I need a cheeper soulution for now. I would not be using this for too long as I am saving for a proper one.

[ProjectBox153]

Don't make a Pi your NAS. Get an old free Dell OptiPlex (Core 2 Duo OptiPlex machines are always given to me by complete strangers) and use FreeNAS. You'll be far happier with the better speeds, not to mention far better drive upgrade options.

[LAwLz]

41 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Don't make a Pi your NAS. Get an old free Dell OptiPlex (Core 2 Duo OptiPlex machines are always given to me by complete strangers) and use FreeNAS. You'll be far happier with the better speeds, not to mention far better drive upgrade options.

FreeNAS on an OptiPlex is not recommended.

FreeNAS relies heavily on ECC RAM for data integrity, and if you just get a random OptiPlex it will not have that.

Besides, ZFS would be a complete overkill if you're going for a simple setup.

[ProjectBox153]

58 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

FreeNAS on an OptiPlex is not recommended.

FreeNAS relies heavily on ECC RAM for data integrity, and if you just get a random OptiPlex it will not have that.

Besides, ZFS would be a complete overkill if you're going for a simple setup.

Why wouldn't it work like on any other machine? Do you really need ECC memory for a home setup? No. I've never had issue with my machine (years now) other than older drives. It works perfectly fine for a home user like me who relies on a NAS for more than just basic storage. I have programs writing and reading to/from the NAS 24/7. No issues. I would highly recommend it because it's easy to get going to just works. -Dell OptiPlex FreeNAS User (Me)

[Ginger_]

2 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Don't make a Pi your NAS. Get an old free Dell OptiPlex (Core 2 Duo OptiPlex machines are always given to me by complete strangers) and use FreeNAS. You'll be far happier with the better speeds, not to mention far better drive upgrade options.

Issues mentioned above as well, but it's not worth it to do that at all. Those old cpus are awful on power, 

 

Idle most sit around 100-110 watts, and with a load will shoot up past 150.

 

Assuming they sit at idle all year, that's going to cost somewhere around $115 a year. Obviously it's going to higher than that because there will be a load on it. 

[ProjectBox153]

9 minutes ago, Ginger137 said:

Issues mentioned above as well, but it's not worth it to do that at all. Those old cpus are awful on power, 

 

Idle most sit around 100-110 watts, and with a load will shoot up past 150.

 

Assuming they sit at idle all year, that's going to cost somewhere around $115 a year. Obviously it's going to higher than that because there will be a load on it. 

I'm running many of these machines and no, they're not power hogs. Idle of 100-110 watts? No. And the "issues" mentioned above are not actual issues, just ones that someone has proposed (and I have disproved). My power bill has not gone up much at all (definitely not $115) and I have several of these machines running. One of them sits at 100% load 24/7.

[Ginger_]

9 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

I'm running many of these machines and no, they're not power hogs. Idle of 100-110 watts? No. And the "issues" mentioned above are not actual issues, just ones that someone has proposed (and I have disproved). My power bill has not gone up much at all (definitely not $115) and I have several of these machines running. One of them sits at 100% load 24/7.

Hmm.. First site I looked at must of been off a bit. Still, especially at 100% they are power hogs and it's worth the extra money up front to buy more efficient hardware. That's also over the course of a year, your not going to see your bill shoot up a huge amount like that in a month, but it'll be a bit higher and add up. 

 

Plug in your watts here, you pay more than you realize https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/electricity-calculator.html

 

 

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[Ginger_]

On topic OP, you can't beat a Pi if you need just basic storage. It's not fast, about 11-12 MBps is what I got when I had one set up, but its super cheap up front and super low power. 

 

Just use OMV for the OS, use a wired connection, and your good to go for basics

[ProjectBox153]

24 minutes ago, Ginger137 said:

Hmm.. First site I looked at must of been off a bit. Still, especially at 100% they are power hogs and it's worth the extra money up front to buy more efficient hardware. That's also over the course of a year, your not going to see your bill shoot up a huge amount like that in a month, but it'll be a bit higher and add up. 

 

Plug in your watts here, you pay more than you realize https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/electricity-calculator.html

 

 

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I understand what you're saying, and I'm not saying that these are the most energy efficient machines ever, but for the price of the machine ($35 for a Pi + $x for drives + $x for adapters to connect them to the Pi vs. $0 for a Dell + $x for drives), the added performance (I get about 120MB/s over 10/100/1000 with my free OptiPlex 330 and free drives) just might be worth the small added power cost.

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Why wouldn't it work like on any other machine? Do you really need ECC memory for a home setup? No. I've never had issue with my machine (years now) other than older drives. It works perfectly fine for a home user like me who relies on a NAS for more than just basic storage. I have programs writing and reading to/from the NAS 24/7. No issues. I would highly recommend it because it's easy to get going to just works. -Dell OptiPlex FreeNAS User (Me)

Because running ZFS without ECC is a really, really bad idea if you care about your data and want to keep it safe.

The problem is that ZFS is built in such a way that all the data corruption mechanics is based on the assumption that the RAM is safe and error-free. A single corrupt bit in RAM could cause your entire drive pool to become corrupted.

ZFS compares the checksum of data every time it is read, and if there is a mismatch between the data on disk and in RAM, it will assume the data in RAM is correct, and write that back to the disk. This will happen silently in the background, so every time you read a file from your ZFS pool, you and your NAS is putting 100% faith into the RAM being 100% correct. If a single big is flipped in RAM, then that corruption will overwrite the good data on the disk, permanently corrupting it (all self-healing mechanics in ZFS assumes that the RAM is 100% correct).

 

Is one bit in RAM stuck in a certain position and you run a scrub on your pool? Congratulations, you will now have corrupted your entire drive. It will start reading good data from your drive, and writing "corrected" (actually corrupted) data back to your drive.

 

There are strong arguments to be made that your data will be safer on a system like RAID5 ext4 (or any other file system which doesn't do their own parity and checksums) than on ZFS without ECC.

If a bit is flipped in RAM on such file systems, it will not touch the data on disk. You might be served a corrupt file and need to access it once again, but that's it. It won't corrupt the data on disk too just because of RAM issues. ZFS however, will.

 

You might not have run into any issues yet, but you are essentially driving your car without a seat-belt, saying that you have never had a crash before.

Now, faulty RAM is fairly rare so a setup without ECC might work fine, but you are gambling with your data for no real purpose. If you want to use ZFS then use ECC memory. Otherwise you are better off with another file system.

[DarkPlatinum]

I use OpenMediaVault for running a media server on my raspberry pi. I have a full USB (16GB) filled with movies and i have 2x 8GB USBs that are empty. The media server can stream very well. I have a 50MbPS router. I must say that if you were to use the raspberry pi as a home server, it is not worth it. Pretty good for a media server. 

 

It is much faster to use the USBs in a computer, rather than transferring data over the internet. Basically, its going from your laptop, to the router, to the raspberry pi and then to the USBs. The limiting factor is, router speed, and USB speed.

[ProjectBox153]

8 minutes ago, DarkPlatinum said:

It is much faster to use the USBs in a computer, rather than transferring data over the internet. Basically, its going from your laptop, to the router, to the raspberry pi and then to the USBs. The limiting factor is, router speed, and USB speed.

The limiting factor is more of the 10/100 ethernet port. USB 2 is 480Mb/s, but there's quite a bottleneck going through a 100Mbs port.

[DarkPlatinum]

On 12/29/2017 at 10:34 PM, Jamiec1130 said:

The limiting factor is more of the 10/100 ethernet port. USB 2 is 480Mb/s, but there's quite a bottleneck going through a 100Mbs port.

You forgot USB 3 . Anyway, I see your point, but dream on about getting 480Mb/s USB transfer anyway.