Will this DIY NAS work?

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Soldato
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There's no room in my HTPC for more HDDs. I've decided a NAS is probably the better route anyway, allowing me to access my media from any room using the fire tv stick for example.

Now some NASs look nice, all enclosed etc but they're expensive and can be noisy so I've been trying to spec my own. All i need to do is have drives show up on the network and they only need to be as fast as needed to stream video. I've read that USB2.0 is quick enough for the highest quality blu-ray material. 4k maybe not but if I can't justify a couple hundred on a NAS then I sure as can't justify a 4k tv yet :p

So here's my plan:

I use the Raspberry Pi as the controller

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Then the hard drives plugged in using this

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With the data usb into the pi and the power usb into one of these

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Also hack together some sort of case.

The only thing I'm concerned about is powering the HDDs via USB. That particular hub will spit out 5V at 2.4A.

Is this likely to work?
 
Take a look at this (long) thread.

The HP microserver is ideal to set up as a NAS. You've got room for 4 drives in a neat cube. Mine is just in the cupboard under the stairs and the only time I ever do anything with it is power down when we are going away.
 
The Pi's ethernet is only 10/100 and goes through the USB controller so it doesn't run particularly fast if you're using bother at the same time - that's something to bare in mind
 
I thought it would just be a fun little project that also had potential to double up as a usable NAS. However I don't want to even try if it's not going to work. Do you have any idea of max transfer speeds for the Pi?
 
One said:
I thought it would just be a fun little project that also had potential to double up as a usable NAS. However I don't want to even try if it's not going to work. Do you have any idea of max transfer speeds for the Pi?
Click to expand...

Theoretically you'd get about 12MB/s via the network side,
good enough for BR streaming,
but the unknown quantity is the USB chip (simplistically the network is basically a USB->Ethernet dongle) would it divide the USB bandwidth among the USB devices or pass through at full speed.

Load up some sort of Linux distro enable samba, plug in a USB stick see what transfer rates you get
 
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peterwalkley said:
Take a look at this (long) thread.

The HP microserver is ideal to set up as a NAS. You've got room for 4 drives in a neat cube. Mine is just in the cupboard under the stairs and the only time I ever do anything with it is power down when we are going away.
Click to expand...

This. For approx £100 you can pick up a microserver, which is a lot more powerful than the Pi, very reliable and just an awesome bit of kit in general for the cost. I've never looked back.
 
RPi is a bad idea for this because of the Ethernet over the USB, and the lack of SATA meaning you need SATA over usb too.

I used to use a Banana Pi as a NAS, it worked well. It's a similar device but has native SATA, and native Gigabit Ethernet. This leaves USB completely free for other storage devices. Worked fine as a Deluge server, NAS, etc.

I upgraded as it didn't have enough grunt to transcode for plex.

http://www.bananapi.org/p/product.html
 
Cool. Well I found the rpi for £20 so I'm going to give that a go first. If it turns out to be too slow then I can upgrade to the banana or go down the microserver route.
 
As others have already said. It's very possible and doable however you'd probably be better plugging a USB drive into your router (if it has USB input) as it would perform just as well.

A battered old laptop running something headless would probably outperform it and keep power draw levels low.
 
rtho782 said:
RPi is a bad idea for this because of the Ethernet over the USB, and the lack of SATA meaning you need SATA over usb too.

I used to use a Banana Pi as a NAS, it worked well. It's a similar device but has native SATA, and native Gigabit Ethernet. This leaves USB completely free for other storage devices. Worked fine as a Deluge server, NAS, etc.

I upgraded as it didn't have enough grunt to transcode for plex.

http://www.bananapi.org/p/product.html
Click to expand...

Does it have native SATA? I can't see any SATA headers/ports?

Kinda interested in getting one... :)
 
rtho782 said:
RPi is a bad idea for this because of the Ethernet over the USB, and the lack of SATA meaning you need SATA over usb too.

I used to use a Banana Pi as a NAS, it worked well. It's a similar device but has native SATA, and native Gigabit Ethernet. This leaves USB completely free for other storage devices. Worked fine as a Deluge server, NAS, etc.

I upgraded as it didn't have enough grunt to transcode for plex.

http://www.bananapi.org/p/product.html
Click to expand...

Oh reminds me of something someone was complaining about once - not really sure of the details but if you use ethernet and SATA in certain configs with the RPi you end up limited to 12MBit/s (end to end) throughput or something for some uses.
 
Rroff said:
Oh reminds me of something someone was complaining about once - not really sure of the details but if you use ethernet and SATA in certain configs with the RPi you end up limited to 12MBit/s (end to end) throughput or something for some uses.
Click to expand...

Storage over the USB interface :-)
 
Yeah aware of the USB implications but apparently in certain advanced configs it knocks back support to USB1.1 or something? or atleast completely strangles throughput.
 
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Just buy a Synology, don't waste your time with a Pi for this task.

Pi's are great, but they aren't a replacement for a nas.

Do it properly, once.
 
If anyone wants to mess about with a pi get that magazine out this month they've put a cut down Pi on the cover as a freebie !
 
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