Is it possible to have a 5 drive Rasberry Pi 5 NAS?

[FuchsFuchs1]

I needed a very cheap nas for a while so i was woundering if i could make a simple nas with a rasberry pi 5 and 5 drives. Also is there alimit to how big drives can be on the rasberry pi?

[Eigenvektor]

The maximum size depends on the file system and whether you use MBR or GPT.

 

But I doubt the Pi has the necessary IO to connect this many drives. You might be able to hack something together with a USB hub, but that would likely be unreliable and slow.

[FuchsFuchs1]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

The maximum size depends on the file system and whether you use MBR or GPT.

 

But I doubt the Pi has the necessary IO to connect this many drives. You might be able to hack something together with a USB hub, but that would likely be unreliable and slow.

and probably wont support software raid wich is why i have 5 drives...

[Kilrah]

Something like this https://pineberrypi.com/products/hatdrive-bottom-2230-2242-2280-for-rpi5

Plus something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Non-Raid-Adapter-Desktop-Support/dp/B07T3RMFFT?th=1 or https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004912382972.html

 

Will probably work, albeit with limited bandwidth.

But between the pi, these, plus appropriate power supplies/casings it'll probably end up more expensive than an old used PC that would run circles around the pi.

[FuchsFuchs1]

8 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Something like this https://pineberrypi.com/products/hatdrive-bottom-2230-2242-2280-for-rpi5

Plus something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Non-Raid-Adapter-Desktop-Support/dp/B07T3RMFFT?th=1 or https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004912382972.html

 

Will probably work, albeit with limited bandwidth.

But between the pi, these, plus appropriate power supplies/casings it'll probably end up more expensive than an old used PC that would run circles around the pi.

A old pc will use way more power then a rasberry pi 5 also i doubt a pentium will do it better

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, FuchsFuchs1 said:

A old pc will use way more power then a rasberry pi 5 also i doubt a pentium will do it better

So a desktop PC idles at 25 watts instead of 2.5 watts. True that's 10 times the power consumption, but it's still splitting hairs in the grand scheme of things. (I'm not counting drives in the equation, because they'll be equal no matter which platform you choose.)

 

The Raspberry Pi is optimized for power consumption and to hit a price point, not to be an especially performant computer. Even decade-old x86 CPUs run circles around a Pi 5. It also won't support hardware video transcoding if you plan on running Plex or Jellyfin.

 

And like @Kilrah said, by the time you buy the Pi, power supply, m.2 hat, and Mini PCIe to SATA breakout board, you'll have spent as much as it would cost you to get a small form factor OptiPlex, if not more. You can get an OptiPlex tower with an i5-6500 and 8 gigs of RAM for about $80 shipped in the US. Just add a boot SSD for your OS of choice and a couple large capacity hard drives you can run in a mirror. (If you're worried about power consumption, fewer high-capacity drives are better than a bunch of smaller ones.)