NAS with RasPi and external SSD?

[PizzaPuntThomas]

My new raspberry pi arrived this week, and I was thinking if I could maybe put TrueNAS (or something similar) on the micro sd card and use an external ssd to make a NAS out of it. I wan't to know if this is possible and smart to do. I don't need a NAS, but I do like the idea of having one. If someone would be able to answer my questions then that would be great! 

[Levent]

You dont need to use anything like truenas to make a nas out of anything. As long as device repository has NFS and/or SAMBA in it, all you have to do is mount the drive and set a samba/nfs share to it. I have been using a OrangePi Zero as a nas with two external HDDs for the last 3 years.

[Master Disaster]

If you do want that "just works" NAS OS then you'll need OMV (OpenMediaVault), last time I played around with a PI NAS it was the only one that supported the Pi.

[PizzaPuntThomas]

Thank you both for your answers! I will be experimenting with different uses for my Pi, and a NAS will be one of them! 

[Vovozona]

On 2/25/2022 at 3:34 PM, Levent said:

You dont need to use anything like truenas to make a nas out of anything. As long as device repository has NFS and/or SAMBA in it, all you have to do is mount the drive and set a samba/nfs share to it. I have been using a OrangePi Zero as a nas with two external HDDs for the last 3 years.

I'm curious on this one. How's the NAS performance with an Orange Pi Zero?

[Levent]

43 minutes ago, Vovozona said:

I'm curious on this one. How's the NAS performance with an Orange Pi Zero?

You are pretty much limited by 100mbps ethernet %99 of the time. Ram and CPU (despite being 512mb) can handle a lot more. CPU definitely needs a heatsink as bare minimum. Towards the end of my time using it as a nas, I was actively encoding video files with FFMPEG and had to put a fan on the thing.