Amazing work! You probably get better efficiency if you use something like LVM and share a logical volume (rather than a file). But it's a good option if you just want to have external storage. In some of my testing, I noticed what looked like queueing of network packets as the Pi had to move network traffic to the RAID array disks, and I'm guessing the Pi's SoC is just not built to pump through hundreds of MB of traffic indefinitely. Make it available anywhere in your home with your own Raspberry Pi network-attached storage, The MagPi magazine is 100 issues young. One thing you must have mentioned that a backup power, the files will be doomed if such thing happens. Assemble And Format The Disks. Anything written to one disk is automatically written to the other. You can polish off this project with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). In your benchmarks did you try to play with raid10 layout options (near, far, ...); I was always wondering how the impact performance for spinning HDD versus SSD. Raspberry Pi 4 offers USB 3.0, so make sure you get external USB drives that take advantage of that extra speed. Today I'll show you how to build a rock-solid home/office NAS server using a Mini-ITX motherboard, a dedicated hardware RAID card, and enterprise class SAS hard drives, all in a Mini-ITX NAS case with an 8 drive hot-swap bay. If you’ve got a lot of files like photos, music, or movies, chances are they are sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Why not set up a DLNA streaming server or run multiple databases? If a drive does fail, your system will be in a ‘degraded’ state, meaning that data is at risk until the drive is replaced. I appreciate you a lot for doing this. I linked to those in my initial Pi Compute Module 4 Review post. As with most Pi projects, you’ll want to open a Terminal, either on the Pi itself … For the more adventurous user, Docker is an excellent way of making your NAS perform multiple functions without getting into a configuration nightmare. 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. RAID is not a backup system. Nicola King sees LEDs in a new light, Michael Pick is so excited to show you his tiny homage to Apple’s iconic machine, as David Crookes discovers, Add a super-fast M.2 SATA SSD to Raspberry Pi 4 along with dual full-sized HDMI sockets, a power button and fan cooling. I will also release a new instructable on this topic soon with improved casing and software. Is it the 1GB, 4GB or 8GB version. Many UPSes can communicate their status to your Raspberry Pi over USB, so a safe shutdown can be triggered. - The (roughly) 5Gbits of PCIe are always going to be bottlenecked by the 1Gbit of Ethernet. Download Raspbian Buster Lite and burn it to a microSD card. For the first solution, we will be using a software called Samba to build a NAS with Raspberry Pi. In reply to How much ram does the… by oREDi. 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. Above all, it is important to present the necessary material for this … If you want to create file shares that are private to individual users, just create their own directory on the RAID array: Again, replace username with the user you want. Finally, change your password and, under Network Options, change the Hostname (the NAS’s network name) if you wish. Did you look at the energy consumption of your setup? Using the Raspberry Pi as an always-on NAS box sounds like a wonderful use of the silent little device. The first thing I wanted to test was whether a SATA drive—in this case, a Kingston SATA 3 SSD—would run faster connected directly through a SATA controller than it ran connected through a USB 3.0 controller and a UASP-enabled USB 3.0 to SATA enclosure. Sudden power cuts can spell disaster for Linux-based systems due to the way they handle files in memory. Extract the disk image. Try three issues for just £5, then pay £25 every six issues. The files themselves should be available with appropriate security measures over desired protocols. Also, for now I don't use a power switch (though later on I might wire one up), nor do I have any kind of indicators (yet). I’m currently working on designing a customized IO board for the CM4 for this exact purpose. If you have more drives, it will continue up the alphabet. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a big improvement over the RPI 3 on many fronts. Set this up and create a regular cron job to make sure your data survives. Now type ‘w’ (to write the changes to the disk). Thanks for answering. Instead of using the RAID function on these boards, configure each drive in JBOD and use ZFS to create volumes. New Raspberry Pi 4 USB 3.0 Personal Cloud With RAID Backup: Hello and welcome. As you can see, connected directly via SATA, the SSD can give noticeably better performance on all metrics, especially for small file random IO, which is important for many use cases. 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. I ran into a few different issues when formatting different sets of disks. Very thorough job. Just keep pressing ENTER (accepting the defaults) until ‘Created a new partition’ appears. The results weren't promising, and has me thinking of using my Intel NUC instead since it has several USB 3 ports. 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! But I decided to go all out (well, at least within a < $100 budget) and buy three more Kingston SSDs to test them in the same RAID configurations: And it was a little surprising—since the Raspberry Pi's PCI Express 1x 2.0 lane only offers around 5 Gbps theoretical bandwidth, the maximum real-world throughput you could get no matter how many SSDs you add is around 330 MB/sec. RAID 10 backs off that performance a bit, but it's still respectable and offers a marked improvement over a single drive. ZFS is very stable and guarantees you won't lose a 'bit' of data before it tells the system it's done. So more RAM would definitely help make for more consistent transfers, but I don't think that's the only bottleneck, as copies would still start showing slowdowns after only 1-2 GB sometimes, even after a fresh reboot. A Raspberry Pi NAS is affordable and easy to set up, all you need is a Raspberry Pi and some digital storage. Now let’s make a directory and allow all users access: Tell Samba to share the directory on the network by editing the config file: Save (CTRL+X, followed by Y), then restart Samba: To give a user access to the shared files, we need to run a special command to set a Samba password. Give the system a few seconds to ‘see’ the disks, then enter the following: This command tells you about devices connected to the system. There are many different forms, but we’re using one of the simplest: RAID‑1, or mirroring. Install the hard drives in the enclosures, … What about a power switch and display / indicator for status? Since the day I received a pre-production Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and IO Board, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express cards with the Pi, and documenting everything I've learned. Now to share some files on the network using the popular protocol, SMB/CIFS. With the Raspberry Pi up to date, we can go ahead and install the packages that we will be relying … The one starting ‘mmcblk0’ is the microSD card containing Raspbian. Thank you for sharing your benchmark and all the steps. Disappointed with the results I accepted the failure and moved to other projects. 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! I was leaning toward a 2 port NAS since 3.5 in hard drives are available in 18tb and soon 20tb variants. We will use that as a basis to for the installation. Self-storage. I have full directions for recompiling the kernel with SATA support on the Pi itself, too! Getting started with the Raspberry Pi Set up your Raspberry Pi and explore what it can do. First, install the software RAID manager, mdadm: Now instruct mdadm to create the RAID-1 array: Raspbian will now see both physical disks as a single device. 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. Just - wow. To use a Pi 1 or 2 … We imaginatively changed ours to ‘nas’, so the network address is ‘nas.local’. Then enter ‘p’ (for primary partition). To make sure mdadm automatically configures the RAID array on boot, persist the configuration into the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file: And to make sure the filesystem is mounted at boot, add the following line to the bottom of your /etc/fstab file: One other thing I had to do a number of times during my testing was delete and re-create the array, which is not too difficult: Then also make sure to remove any entries added to your /etc/fstab or /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf files, since those would cause failures during startup! Now only that user can access that directory. We'll then look at whether that improves performance for I/O intensive tasks such as pulling a Docker image down from the public registry. Purchasing & Delivery You may be liable for import duties, sales tax, or customs processing fees. A well-implemented, network-attached storage device is typically a headless device (no keyboard or monitor) providing access to large amounts of data from anywhere on your network. (It's single client, so synchronization primitives are less important. Today we will be looking at how to build your very own Cloud software system that will allow you to store your personal information in a cloud that you Control and maintain. Tutorials on Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows and Networking. Run the following: If you are asked any questions, just select the default answer. But putting slower hard drives into RAID can give better performance, so I next tested all four WD Green drives in RAID 0 and RAID 10: And, as you'd expect, RAID 0 basically pools all the drives' performance metrics together, to make for an array that finally competes with the tiny microSD card for 4K performance, while also besting the Kingston SSD for synchronous file copies. I am not so experienced with pi, but why didn't you consider OMV ? ... Configuring RAID 5. This article first appeared in The MagPi 85 and was written by PJ Evans. The Raspbian version of this has the slightly more friendly name of Samba, but it is not installed by default. to all the different products I used to build my SATA RAID array: Wow. I bought this model because it is pretty average in terms of performance, but mostly because it was cheap to buy four of them! 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. Thanks to Alex Ellis and Emmet Young for their excellent blog posts on RAID and Samba. Installing Ubuntu Server. You’ll be asked a series of questions about sectors. The ROCK Pi SATA HATs come in 3 models: Or it… by Jason Harrison. However, setting it up as one used to be an involved process. 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. Raspberry Pi-powered quad NAS with Radxa SATA HAT Radxa has announced the ROCK Pi SATA HAT, a series of SATA expansion targeting at the NAS solution for Raspberry Pi 4 and ROCK Pi 4. Use your favorite program to unzip the file – I used 7zip, which you may … Most of these can also be implemented on a Raspberry Pi NAS. 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! I'm pretty sure this is also what I'm running into with my laptop usb drive raidz nas that's limited by the 1x pcie lanes to the pch. Hi thank you for sharing this valuable information. Hi, Using the Raspberry Pi 4, with portable USB drives configured in a Linux RAID configuration. dmraid 10 is not exactly 1+0. fdisk will now exit. After switching to the appropriate keyboard language, it … Getting access to those files and making sure they are protected from drive failure can be challenging without an expensive network-attached storage (NAS) solution. (Raspberry Pi 4 is too hard to get at the moment, but I will see if I can get one soon :P ) Raspberry Pi 4 support will definitely be added soon, with its on board USB3.0 port and Gigabyte Ethernet, it is the best board to setup a Raspberry Pi NAS. The limiting factor in the performance for a NAS on RPI is always going to be the 1GB Ethernet port. The setup is headless, meaning we access the RaspberryPi only via remote SSH controls. Using Linux's Multiple Device admin tool (mdadm), we can put these drives together in any common RAID arrangement. I work with storages for last ten years, maybe more, but what you do here is just excellent :). This part’s pretty easy. The ideal solution is to use a cloud provider such as Google or Dropbox to back everything up. over 1 year ago. But a 5 port compact SATA SSD NAS would also be interesting. No keyboard, mouse or display are required to be connected to the Pi. maltesander In this tutorial we build a NAS Samba DLNA RAID server on RaspberryPi 3 Model B. In reply to Hi thank you for sharing… by Johan. You’ll save money and get a regular supply of in-depth reviews, features, guides and other PC enthusiast goodness delivered directly to your door every month. Save 37% off the cover price with a subscription to The MagPi magazine. This cloud will also employ a RAID … 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!). Our NAS can now create file shares, the most basic of capabilities. I'm looking for a new project and this is looking good. If you’ve enabled SSH, you’ve already got SFTP available; just connect using your favourite FTP client using /mnt/raid1/shared as the starting point. Once booted, make sure SSH has been enabled by running sudo raspi-config and selecting Interfacing Options > SSH. Posted Plus, power requirements would be far lower. Using Samba is one of the simplest ways to build a Raspberry Pi NAS as it is easy to set up and configure. 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. In reply to You only have one PCIe lane… by Markocloud. In this project, we’re going to setup a Raspberry Pi 4 NAS using openmediavault. Got a lot of digital stuff? Technically it's not required to partition before creating the array... but there are a couple small reasons it seems safer that way. So, to grant access to the current user, ‘pi’: You’ll be asked to choose a password (it doesn’t have to be the same as your Raspberry Pi password). For each of the drives that were recognized, if you want to use it in a RAID array (which I do), you should add a partition. 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. These file- and media-serving black boxes can punch a hole in your bank account, particularly the professional versions aimed at businesses. So why do you think it matters if your drives are USB or SATA attached? Make a crazy Christmas game and guide Santa on his Christmas Eve run, delivering the MagPi magazine, LED cubes may not be new, but one maker has created a cube with a USP – a status monitor for his PC. The most important decision you’ll make is how much storage you’ll need. I’ve been wondering about using Pi for a Raid1 with 1 or 2 TB SSDs for storing high value data backups. Have you been able to test different SATA chipsets? By Lucy Hattersley, Build a Home Assistant: the light fantastic, Play with colour and mood, or go completely disco with Home Assistant's light controls. Quit (CTRL+X, followed by Y), then run the following so the RAID array starts up correctly on boot: Reboot and you should have /mnt/raid1 ready to go. To provide a layer of protection, you’ll need to double the number of drives to make sure your data is safer. 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. NAS can be expensive. That means it should protect against system failures that cause significant downtime, and make sure no data is lost as a result of those failures. Rotary drives give us lower cost and higher capacity than SSDs. 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. There was a post here that provided some basic instructions for setting up OMV5 on buster. And the SATA kernel modules are not included by default, which means the first step in using a PCIe card like the IO Crest (which has a Marvell 9215 chip—which is supported in the kernel) is to compile (or cross-compile, in my case) the kernel with CONFIG_ATA and CONFIG_SATA_AHCI enabled. 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. 04 December 2016 on Raspberry PI, DevOps, nas, benchmarking, nfs, ssh In this tutorial we'll convert a stock Raspbian Lite OS into a NAS with two 314GB WDLabs PiDrives in a RAID-1 array. I had and NAS together so the intent is to set up the NAS for local network storage for my videos and documents but also as storage for the volume data used by the docker containers. You can find a few SATA HATs for the Raspberry Pi 4 that support single SATA or mSATA connections, such as Geekworm’s $26 X825 or Renkforce’s $19 SATA Extension Board, but Radxa’s new line of SATA HATs for network attached storage (NAS) applications appear to be the first to support multiple SATA connections. You only have one PCIe lane to work with whether you have a regular rpi4 (the USB3 is attached to it) or you have an expansion card. Visit our projects site for tons of fun, step-by-step project guides with Raspberry Pi HTML/CSS Python Scratch Blender. In reply to Thank you for sharing your… by Gonzalo. No link for the RPI4? Using the powered USB 3.0 hub connected to your Raspberry Pi, plug in all your USB disk drives.