Hi everyone. I’ve just completed my NAS built on a RPi 4B 2Gb and a 2TB WD My Passport USB drive. Most of the projects seem to specify the 4Gb Pi model, but just try finding one! I decided on a 2Gb model as these are still available from Core as kits, and I figured 2Gb of memory was heaps as we won’t have significant loads on our network. The use will simply be storing local files, photos, videos and HiRes music for streaming. I was right, even with the initial heavy loads of file transfers to the NAS and streaming music simultaneously to a pair of Bluesound Nodes, the memory usage barely reached 14%.
I basically followed Tim’s nice tutorial. Many thanks Tim, nicely done! My system is all Apple (Mac and a couple iPhones) and I experienced some difficulty connecting. I could see the network drive OK on the Mac and iPhones, but just could not connect. Some more tweaking of settings via the OpenMediaVault GUI eventually got me over the line and bingo, we were in!
Oh yes, there was a little gotcha. Make sure you select a USA keyboard from the settings or you will be unable to type some of the symbols like | or @ into the command lines!
What’s left to do now? Well, I will definitely need to create a static IP for the Pi NAS. You can imagine the mess if that changes! I’m sure I’ll find a how-to online for that procedure. Then I will need another 2TB drive to run for backups. I’ll also see if I can find shorter cables to help tidy things up a bit.
Now it’s a matter of cracking on and ripping all of these CDs!
PS. Unfortunately, I could not upload a photo successfully.
This varies based on your router, so if you find tutorials hard to come by that might be why. It’s usually under the DHCP settings, you’ll need the MAC address of the Pi but a simple ifconfig should do the trick.
Also a good idea considering these are portable consumer drives. A separate backup not attached to the Pi that’s regularly updated by you is a good idea, but I ran mdadm software RAID on my Pi with 2 hard drives as described here:
Thanks James. I was able to find the settings in my Mesh router and change the IP to a static one. I might make a little rack system for all the bits to keep them neat too. I’ve learned a lot from this project.
I have bought a 2.5" WD SATA III drive as a “better” storage solution for my Pi NAS and then I’ll use the current WD My Passport as the backup. I also bought a SATA to USB cable.
What is the safest way to add the drive? Is it just a matter of powering the NAS down and connecting the SATA drive, rebooting and then adding the drive in the same way as I did before, through the OpenMediaVault GUI? Then copy all the files from the My Passport drive to the SATA. Once done, removing the My Passport from the GUI interface before disconnecting, or should I leave it connected for backups?
Glad to hear you liked Tims guide! Thats a great way to do it, in order to protect your server, shut it down before adding more drives, Tims guide includes a little footnote (Where to now, below the demonstration) as to how you can add more drives to the system, so give that a look. You can have both drives on the system and configure RAID settings for a more secure way of storing your files.
Regardless of how many drives you have set up, enjoy your home built NAS! Its a great addition to any home network.
I did something similar recently. If you are backing up you’re Mac with time machine then these links may interest you. They will help to get you backups running smoothly and to limit the amount of storage that time machine uses. It is working well for me with 3 Mac’s all sharing the same backup samba share.
What was a pretty smooth install became a bit of a frustration afterwards when I tried adding a second hard drive. Even though I shut the NAS down and turned off the power before plugging in the second drive, it spat the dummy when I powered it up. I could see the new drive, but the original drive had gone awol and of course the share was gone. Reversing the procedure and removing the new drive didn’t help. The original drive could not be recognised and the data was gone. (Yes, I still have copies on the computer!) I rebooted the NAS a number of times to no avail, so was forced to set up the NAS again. I looked up adding a drive to the Pi NAS and there is zero documentation on this. All the chat seems to discuss setting up a NAS from scratch with two drives, nothing about adding a second drive to a working NAS. Now I know why, as it doesn’t seem to be possible without the the thing destroying itself upon finding an intruding new drive!
Has anyone tried this? Now I’m thinking I’ll just rebuild it from scratch with two drives in a RAID. However, I’d still be worried when the time comes that one of the drives fails and has to be replaced.
