Technically it's not required to partition before creating the array... but there are a couple small reasons it seems safer that way. Next I wanted to benchmark a single WD Green 500GB hard drive. The default smb.conf file contains a number of examples, including one for a network share and one for a print share. I linked to those in my initial Pi Compute Module 4 Review post. In reply to Thank you for sharing your… by Gonzalo. I did a bunch of torture testing when I first set things up, and things recovered gracefully. Fortunately, the software (like the hardware) has made leaps and bounds since the last time I tried it and it’s pretty easy to set up. Our little DNS-323 has been rock solid for the last decade but it’s getting long in the tooth and it’s just pokey enough to be annoying when I’m trying to do things on it. It’s good to hear that there’s a way around it (and that you haven’t had any problems after setting them up). I found that I couldn’t get much more than what you’re seeing out of a regular 2.4GHz wireless connection. Before we edit the file, though, we need to create the directory that Samba will use to share over the network: sudo mkdir /mnt/NAS_FILEsudo chown pi /mnt/NAS_FILEsudo chgrp users /mnt/NAS_FILE. Could I send you some to try? Unfortunately, after the upgrade, I discovered that iperf benchmark had very little to do with the actual practical performance. That’s what I get for not reading enough before I buy stuff, I suppose. For example, when I was trying to format four HDDs the first time, I got: And the solution I found in this StackOverflow question was to run: I also ran into the message Device or resource busy when I tried formatting four SSDs, and it would always be a different device that was listed as the one being busy. A average write speed of 67.4 MB/s was measured, a very good result, representing about 60% of maximum gigabit speed, and barely any less than the local write speed of 68.6.In reading, the measured speed was 105 MB/s, an astonishing figure, proving that the Pi 4 is (more or less) saturating the gigabit network. The Pi acting as a NAS. Plus, power requirements would be far lower. In my case, it's already faster than the old Mac mini I have been using as a NAS for years, which has only USB 2.0 ports, limiting my file copies over the network to ~35 MB/sec! Replacing A Failed USB Disk In A Raspberry Pi-Based RAID Mirror, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4235287, Removing IR Filter From ESP32-Cam, Part III, Here’s A Job That’s Still Done Better By Humans, Removing IR Filter From ESP32-CAM, Part II, Recovering A Lost mdadm RAIDset In A Raspberry Pi-Based RAID Mirror, Official Raspberry Pi 4 power supply, qty 1, 4TB Western Digital Blue 3.5″ hard drive, qty 2, Vantec NexStar TX 3.5″ external USB3 enclosure, qty 2, X.X.X.X is the static IP address on your network that you want your NAS to be reachable at, YY is the CIDR representation of your subnet mask (most home or small businesses will be /24), Z.Z.Z.Z is the IP address for your gateway/router, A.A.A.A is the IP address for your primary DNS server, B.B.B.B is the IP address for your secondary DNS server (if you have one). I covered that in the video here: https://youtu.be/oWev1THtA04?t=1096 — but basically it uses ~6W at idle (with drives on), and ~12W max under highest load writing files over the network. I upgraded my NAS + webserver to a raspberry pi 4. I have full directions for recompiling the kernel with SATA support on the Pi itself, too! I was leaning toward a 2 port NAS since 3.5 in hard drives are available in 18tb and soon 20tb variants. It’s an intermediate tutorial (not for noobs) and shows you how to create a Linux RAID array which is a good skill to have. Discussion. I’m currently working on designing a customized IO board for the CM4 for this exact purpose. Get 96% off our Raspberry Pi Mastery Course Bundle: https://andauth.co/pidealThe Raspberry Pi 4 has great I/O performance with USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet. Once that’s done and you get no errors, safely remove the enclosures from your PC. Hi, I'm running a samba server on my Raspberry PI 4 2GB. Then you can manage raid, samba, vpn and all other features inside the OMV GUI. Programming Perfection! We have finally come to a point when disk speeds of over 100MB/s are mainstream for USB 3 Hard disks. Otherwise, you will have to browse to it. to all the different products I used to build my SATA RAID array: Wow. Insights of RISC OS Run those two commands again and make sure everything looks good before going any further. Go back, check all of the parts and connections, and try again. If you’re using wireless… well, I suppose you can do that if you really want or need to, but you’re going to be making your Pi do its work with one foot in a bucket. Now, thanks to the improved throughput of Raspberry Pi 4 with USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, you can build a fully featured NAS for a fraction of the cost. I bought this model because it is pretty average in terms of performance, but mostly because it was cheap to buy four of them! The speed and performance of the new Raspberry Pi 4 is a step up from earlier models. Check out the mdadm man page. If you don’t get that message, go back through the file and make sure everything is spelled properly, etc. Again, this is how I set up my own little two-disk mirror. So, follow this article step by step to turn your Raspberry Pi into a NAS Server. If you’re here, that means you have successfully set up your Raspberry Pi, can see it on the network, and have two hard disks connected via USB. I ran into a few different issues when formatting different sets of disks. Using the Raspberry Pi 4, with portable USB drives configured in a Linux RAID configuration. Openmediavault works very well with USB Raid. Each U represents an active and healthy RAID disk. The username will be: localhost\USERNAME, which in my case waslocalhost\pi. Raspberry Pi NAS builds are exceptionally popular, and we’ve seen more than we can count over the years. Also, the client OS can do more caching.) If not, go back over the file and make sure the changes you made were saved. Go right to the bottom of the file, and add the following lines: Make sure that you type everything exactly. So there are other IO pressures that the Pi reaches that make RAID for SATA SSDs less of a performance option than for spinning hard drives. Here, a solid-state drive (SSD) is connected via a USB adapter and the average read and write throughput measured in megabytes per second (MBps). Now, for each user account you want to grant access, you need to run the smbpasswd utility to set them up in Samba. Works super well and saves time. There are many single-board computers and SoC that are using ARM processors. I want to replace my old NAS with a low-energy but powerful replacement. PI 4 Bad NAS performance. For my board, I’m currently eying the JMB582 or JMB585 which are pci to 2 or 5 port SATA chips, respectively. The post mdadm: device or resource busy had the solution—disable udev when creating the volume, for example: You may also want to watch the progress and status of your RAID array while it is being initialized or at any given time, and there are two things you should monitor: And if all else fails, resort to Google :). Did you find any solution to what you suspect is linux flushing to disk and starving the nic of io bandwidth, continuously tanking the network transfer speed? In reply to No link for the RPI4? The BCM2711B0 in the Raspberry Pi 4 has four CPU cores and has a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, which at first blush doesn’t seem much quicker than the quad-core, 1.4-GHz BCM2837B0 in the Raspberry Pi 3B+. You can setup the drives with a little bit of command line work that I have documented on my YouTube channel. Thanks for answering. I’ve had a few people now mention that it’s easy to use USB drives in OMV. I can imagine an enclosure... thanks for giving this idea some new strength. Raspberry Pi 4 Network Read/Write Tests. I upgraded my NAS + webserver to a raspberry pi 4. It does striping and mirroring "combined" instead of one after the other. I will do another post soon to discuss how to fix a mirror if there’s a disk failure or if you need to recover the array entirely due to a Pi failure. In reply to You only have one PCIe lane… by Markocloud. The Debian-based Linux/Raspberry Pi distribution includes services like SSH, (S)FTP, RSync, and a BitTorrent client, which can be operated through a web interface, making it the perfect out-of-box solution for configuring a Raspberry Pi NAS. Raspberry Pi OS (and indeed, any OS optimized for the Pi currently, like Ubuntu Server for Pi) doesn't include all the standard drivers and kernel modules you might be used to having available on a typical Linux distribution. Turn on the disks, wait for them to spin up, and boot up the Pi. Samba is a re-implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) networking protocol that allows Linux computers to seamlessly integrate into active directory environments. In reply to Hi thank you for sharing… by Johan. How you will access it depends on the operating system on the computer you want to access it with. Hi, Finally, the payoff – your own home-built NAS! Note: The list is in no particular order of ranking. It looked like a race condition of some sort, and after some Googling, I found out that's exactly what it was! I set up a USB drive based NAS over a year ago and have had no problems with it. I already have prepared a NAS with my raspi 4, and I was wondering what power supply are you using for feeding 4 x WD HDD. They may have the CPU horsepower, but with the on-board Ethernet and USB sharing the same USB2 port, their performance is reportedly not all that great. Great write up, was thinking about this as a project (at some stage), you've given me so much really useful information and many new tabs! But it's a good option if you just want to have external storage. Building the fastest Raspberry Pi NAS, with SATA RAID, recompiling the kernel with SATA support on the Pi itself, Samba and NFS installation guides in this issue, CableCreation low-profile SATA cable 5-pack, CoolerGuys 12v 2A Molex power adapter (for drives), Cable Matters Molex to SATA power adapter, ICY DOCK ExpressCage 4-bay 2.5" hot-swap cage, Cross-compiling the Raspberry Pi OS Linux kernel on macOS, I'm booting my Raspberry Pi 4 from a USB SSD, You can use a PCIe switch and use both the SATA array. Using iSCSI (as opposed to NFS or SMB) can be much more efficient. The Pi 4, on the other hand, has entirely different hardware; the USB ports (of which there are two USB3 and two USB2) have their own controller, while the on-board Ethernet has its own controller. Using Samba is one of the simplest ways to build a Raspberry Pi NAS as it is easy to set up and configure. On the surface, the networking functionality is unchanged: there’s still 802.11ac Wi-Fi, though an upgrade to Bluetooth 5.0, plus a wired gigabit Ethernet port. In this tutorial we'll convert a stock Raspbian Lite OS into a NAS with two 314GB WDLabs PiDrives in a RAID-1 array. RAID 10 backs off that performance a bit, but it's still respectable and offers a marked improvement over a single drive. How to do？ In this part, I would like to guide you to DIY a NAS Box. Delete everything in that section and replace it with the following: [NAS] comment = NAS Fileshare path = /mnt/NAS_FILE browseable = yes read only = no writable = yes create mask = 0775 directory mask = 0775 valid users = pi. The first card I tested after completing my initial review was the IO Crest 4-port SATA card pictured with my homegrown Pi NAS setup below: But it's been a long time testing, as I wanted to get a feel for how the Raspberry Pi handled a variety of storage situations, including single hard drives and SSD and RAID arrays built with mdadm . If you are planning to set up a NAS with Raspberry pi 4 it is a great option at this point. It turns out that SATA chips are very difficult to get a hold of and JMicron is the only one that has been responsive. Amazing work! Did you look at the energy consumption of your setup? I’m an engineering technologist by trade but a tinkerer at heart. Disk fragmentation can slow things down, and the old NAS is a decade old, but it was only about half full so that shouldn’t have been too big a problem. PiNAS - the Raspberry Pi NAS: Intro:This instructable describes the build of a very compact Raspberry Pi powered two bay network attached storage (NAS).Features: Super small Easy to build Simple setup Cheap Perfect for learning about network, file system, security mech… No link for the RPI4? Enhances the performance and efficiency of the system as well. Once it comes back up, see if you can ping other devices both inside and outside your network. I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 2 NAS to the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 3B+ hoping to get the network performance boost promised by an excellent iperf benchmark. I'm looking for a new project and this is looking good. For the first solution, we will be using a software called Samba to build a NAS with Raspberry Pi. It seemed to work in both cases, though I did my actual benchmarks for the HDDs while they were connected through a 600W power supply (overkill, I know!). Nice and quick. In reply to How much ram does the… by oREDi. The results weren't promising, and has me thinking of using my Intel NUC instead since it has several USB 3 ports. The limiting factor in the performance for a NAS on RPI is always going to be the 1GB Ethernet port. I had originally planned to use openmediavault to mirror the disks and create the network shares, but unfortunately it doesn’t support USB-connected disks. Thanks, Top of page. With a Raspberry Pi NAS Server, you can easily store anything from movies to games in virtual storage and access it from any device and anywhere in the world. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I have seen the power supply 12V/2A you use for feeding 4 x Kingston SSD, but not the one for 4 x HDD. Today I’ll show you how to build a Raspberry Pi 3/4 RAID NAS server using USB flash drives and the Linux native RAID application mdadm, along with SAMBA so the drive will show up as a normal network folder on Windows PC’s. Open your file or network browser and browse to the static IP address you set way back in Part 4. Once that's done, you should be able to see any drives attached to the card after boot using lsblk, for example: (Wait... how is there also an NVMe drive there?! dmraid 10 is not exactly 1+0. Mit dem neuen Raspberry Pi 4 B* lässt sich ein kleines NAS aufbauen, welches sehr sparsam ist und trotzdem über alle nennenswerten Funktionen verfügt. You probably get better efficiency if you use something like LVM and share a logical volume (rather than a file). Even though Raspberry Pis older than the Pi 4 only have USB 2.0 ports, I wanted to check if they might support UASP, because as we'll see in a minute, just having UASP versus the older BOT protocol makes a large difference in performance, which would help even on older USB 2.0 ports. Also, a NAS server will ensure that your data is totally safe, and no one else can access them except you. Copy the default file: sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf_OLD. If you want to set up a single disk, or set up something like a four-disk mirror, or RAID5/6/1+0, you can use the same software I did but you’ll have to do a bit of research into the settings. There's a stable build available for the Raspberry Pi 4… There are few things I find as satisfying as helping someone out, figuring something out, or learning something new. To check if the Pi sees the enclosures, type lsusb: To see if the actual spinning hard drives have been detected, type dmesg | grep sda for the first enumerated disk, and dmesg | grep sdb for the second: Do not go any farther if the output of either of those commands doesn’t look correct, or if the disk capacity listed is different than you expect. All you have to do is initiate the raid via command line as above. I'm going to create a RAID 10 array for my own use—you can check out the associated video linked above for the reasons why I chose RAID 10 instead of something else. I work with storages for last ten years, maybe more, but what you do here is just excellent :). Samba is a mature, stable, and very useful batch of software that makes it pretty easy to create simple network shares. If things are working properly, the physical enclosures and the disks will be present. Such as Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi, Rockchip 3328, Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, and so on. Your email address will not be published. Are you doing your testing over copper or over wifi? I did copies to and from a Windows PC that has an SSD, and monitored the speed using nload on the Pi and Performance Monitor on the PC. To set a static IP, use your favourite editor to edit the /etc/dhcpcd.conf file. The improved performance also makes the Raspberry Pi 4 the perfect candidate for a media centre, NAS, server, gaming emulator and many other resource-intensive applications. SATA random IO speeds are way faster, so if you're using the Pi to serve up disk images for netboot, VMs, or even for small file sharing, it's going to be a lot faster even over a 1 Gbps port than the same drive through USB 3.0. Besides this GitHub issue, I documented everything I learned in the video embedded below: The rest of this blog post will go through some of the details for setup, but I don't have the space in this post to compile all my learnings here—check out the linked issue and video for that! what tool are u using to test the transferspeed of the share? Obviously, it's not an option when you need to share files — you need to unmount it from one client and mount it on another. But I would definitely like someone to design a nice case that holds the Pi, a specialized (smaller) IO board, a PCIe SATA adapter, a fan, and four SATA drives—ideally designed in a nice, compact form factor! It will ask for a password, and that password really, really should really be different than the password that’s used by the user to log into the Pi itself! The Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, is such a versatile little board that it can act as a cheap trial NAS that—once you grow out of it—can be repurposed for something else. Designing a Raspberry Pi NAS using external USB drives. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Table 3. Using Linux's Multiple Device admin tool (mdadm), we can put these drives together in any common RAID arrangement. One thing you must have mentioned that a backup power, the files will be doomed if such thing happens. As for performance… this setup is much more responsive and can transfer files to and from the disks much faster than the old NAS. Speaking of network traffic, the last test I did was to install and configure both Samba and NFS (see Samba and NFS installation guides in this issue), to test which one offered the best performance for network file copies: It looks like NFS holds the crown on the Pi, though if you use Windows or Android/iOS primarily, you might see slightly different results or have a harder time getting NFS going than Samba.