Raspberry Pi NAS?

[VintageGamer]

I am setting up a NAS at my house and a NAS at least two family member's houses. They are hesitant to spend the money on a dedicated NAS from Synology, QNAP or Buffalo. Performance is also not a concern and we have Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 devices at our houses and plenty of USB hard drives, and I would likely purchase a pair of 8TB or 10TB USB hard drives to ensure we have large enough storage space on each NAS. These would serve as file backups for our comptuers and offsite backups for eachother's NAS's over our OpenVPN router connected houses, so network speed and the additional NAS software features in the commercial NAS's are not a concern either. I also maintain a pair of USB hard drives as file backups that are only connected when updating the backups in case the NAS files or network become corrupted.

 

Instructions for setting up the NAS posted here. I would also install SSH or XRDP on the Pi's so we can administer the devices.

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/build-a-raspberry-pi-nas

 

Specific questions for this are:

• My family is asking about the safety of leaving the drives connected continuously, specifically heat and fire safety
• How well can files be recovered if the software raid fails and the raid needs to be rebuilt
• We would likely use Raspbian or Ubuntu, and are open to suggestions for operating systems

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id stay away from raid here, just run a single hdd, and keep it backed up.

 

OS doesn't really matter, id just do a minimal rasbain install if it was me.

 

Id get a enclosure for the pi, and it should be fine. 

 

Id really suggest just getting a cheap single bay nas if there worried, less wires, simmilar total cost, better software.

 

 

[EpiCheeseTime]

If youre looking for a RAID solution i would look at FreeNAS or Unraid. Both are great and both have GUIs.

 

Linus and Matt have both used Unraid in videos and both have shown how to set it up. Both systems have drive replacement and raid recovery built in, that I believe you can store off site to ensure it wont get lost/corrupt/stolen.

[svmlegacy]

8 minutes ago, VintageGamer said:

My family is asking about the safety of leaving the drives connected continuously, specifically heat and fire safety

HDD's run on low voltage, and are fused. There's no worry of fire or heat.

 

[Jumballi]

Some amazing value options are refurbished intel computers with 3rd-4th gen processors with room for more drives. A bit more expensive but actually more than capable for a NAS. Should be a bit simpler to set up as well.

[mahyar]

i suggest a raspberry pi 4 4gb with freenas or openmediavault and if you want to use raid a good overclock on cpu

[mahyar]

4 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

Some amazing value options are refurbished intel computers with 3rd-4th gen processors with room for more drives. A bit more expensive but actually more than capable for a NAS. Should be a bit simpler to set up as well.

ahhh no a raspberry pi 4 2gb is 35$ and setting up a nas with it is as easy as a x86 pc not to mention low power consumption and smaller size 

[Jumballi]

Just now, mahyar said:

ahhh no a raspberry pi 4 2gb is 35$ and setting up a nas with it is as easy as a x86 pc not mention low power consumption and smaller size 

pi $35
usb hub $15
power cable for pi $10
Enclosure for pi $20

optional but highly recommended sata to usb adapter $15 x # of drives used

Cost of used pc with multiple sata ports already on the motherboard $100
total $100

 

OP mentions raid and external drives are the worst for this in terms of longevity and performance. My entire line of experience is saying to go with internal drives if he wants raid. He can strip the external drives for their bare internal parts, which should remove the controller that's attached so some of them.

Now OP says he has a few raspi laying around, so yes a used computer will be core costly, but not much more costly that it'll burn a hole in his wallet

[Electronics Wizardy]

17 minutes ago, mahyar said:

i suggest a raspberry pi 4 4gb with freenas or openmediavault and if you want to use raid a good overclock on cpu

well your issue is that freenas won't run on a pi.

 

and 4gb is pretty overkill, you really own't need much at all to have a basica nas, 512mb is plenty for this use. Backups don't need much performance normally.

[mahyar]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

well your issue is that freenas won't run on a pi.

 

and 4gb is pretty overkill, you really own't need much at all to have a basica nas, 512mb is plenty for this use. Backups don't need much performance normally.

true and openmediavault is also a great nas software

[VintageGamer]

1 hour ago, EpiCheeseTime said:

If youre looking for a RAID solution i would look at FreeNAS or Unraid. Both are great and both have GUIs.

 

Linus and Matt have both used Unraid in videos and both have shown how to set it up. Both systems have drive replacement and raid recovery built in, that I believe you can store off site to ensure it wont get lost/corrupt/stolen.

FreeNAS and UNRaid are not available for Raspberry Pi hardware and instead require full desktop or server hardware. The Pi is being considered for the cost of the hardware and the low electrical cost.

[VintageGamer]

I'll check out openmediavault. From reading the above posts it sounds like I might also go with a single drive to keep cost low for my family. I am already using Windows Storage Spaces on my primary system to provide some redundancy for my files, which then gets backed up to a rotating pair of USB hard drives that are cold storage/on a shelf. I currently schedule time with family for them backup my files to a USB hard drive at their house over the VPN. This would change my current backup schedule to where the Raspberry Pi's do the backups over the VPN automatically then me and my family do our cold storage backups whenever we want.

[VintageGamer]

openmediavault does not install properly on the pi and instead disabled my eth0 and wlan0. Setting the external drive to mount on system boot, then adding users and groups, and setting up samba shares works and is fast to setup. I may try openmediavault again on another pi, an Oracle VirtualBox VM or an older x86-64 system I have to try it out.

[EpiCheeseTime]

@VintageGamer Ahh..Sorry about that, kinda forgot those dont run on a Pi

[VintageGamer]

I'm also using hdparm to configure the drives to stop spinning when idle after an hour and rsync run with cron jobs to do the scheduled file synchronization between my NAS and the other NAS's at my family's houses.