Raspberry NAS, anyone?

Jan 18, 2025 Last reply: 1 year ago 5 Replies
L


>> I wonder if it would be possible to build a PB storage system for


>>> archive use cases on a bunch of Pi 5? =) Does it have any good ways to
>>> connect disks, or is it still only USB? I wonder how many disks per
>>> system it could handle with c>>
formatting link
>
>> The Pi 5 has a PCIe port and there are Raspberry and third party NMVe >> soluti> Interesting! Thank you for the link. This could be a fun hobby project. I
> wonder if it would be possible, over time, to get it to such a state that
> someone might actually consider using it in production environments? With
> sounds and strong redundancy, maybe!

I have a shelf with IDE/PATA and SATA drives from 200GB and up, that I have not had the heart to throw out. Would it be worth the trouble to find an enclosure and build a NAS out of them? Probably not. The enclosures that can hold 4-6 drives seem to cost twice what a 4 TB USB-3 archive drive costs, so a Pi-4, a USB-3 hub, and two of those wrapped up with rubber bands in a shoebox would be cheaper.


Would anyone like a couple of smaller (say 200 MB) drives for repairing antique systems that can't handle more than 32 bits worth of space?

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D

This works. I've had similar setups at one point of another. These days I stick with 2 x 4 TB drives in a Zyxel NAS (great!) and 2 x 4 TB drives in a Dlink (horrible!) NAS, and that's worked for about 10 years or so.

I had a look today for fun at Pi 5 LSI controllers and I wonder how many spinning SAS disks a single Pi 5 can drive without power problems?

Somewhere in a dark corner of my attic storage space, there is a quantum bigfoot with a copy of my old BBS. I always wonder if it is beyond repair and/or restore? Would be fun to see the "elite haxor" stuff from my childhood! =)

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R

They're worth their weight in gold :) Years ago I went looking for small drives and found they were extremely expensive compared to the current offerings. I went around to the local repair shops and asked if they had any old, small drives. 'No, we throw those in the dumptster. They're not good for anything'.

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L

Maybe it would be worthwhile to re-format them and put them on eBay. I looked, but searching for 200MB only got me newer drives with 200MB of cache!

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A

Cardboard, Ugh....

An old PC case will have plenty of decent air flow, and be able to hold a proper PSU and if tall enough, many drives. Available for free, if you look around. Obviously big, but so are shoeboxes...

With one of these drives, why not install a Pi at a trusted friend's place for your off-site backup, and do one vice versa for his backups. CrashPlan is such as system.

Or have a trailing USB cable permanently attached, so that once in a while you can plug in either a mobile phone or a camera, and have the contents of that device backed up (while also charging the battery?)

Anytime I'm seeing folks on YouTube messing with PATA IDE/SCSI Retro hardware, they seem to be adding modern adaptors to plug- in SD memory cards, so maybe that ship has sailed ...

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1

I recently ordered a 5-drive hat for a Pi5. Dunno if OpenMediaVault (a distro) will boot on the thing (likely not) but if not I'll fake something using NFS or Samba and have my compact NAS :-)

When the thing comes in an I have a chance to fool around with it I'll post something.

The Samsung Pro SATA SSDs ought to be about perfect.

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