RPi Managed UPS

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1

Hi,

I am building a home NAS with the following:
• 1 x RPi4
• 2 x Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro 3.5" SATA3 Drives
• 2 x StarTech USB 3.0 to SATA powered cables
• 1 x TerraPi case

To secure this against power outages I would like to run this from a UPS. I am looking to run Network UPS Tools (NUT) on the Pi to manage a clean shutdown if required. So the UPS needs to be able to signal the Pi and be NUT compatible.

I note you have the PSD650 UPS 650VA Defender UPS that is about the size I am lookin for. Brfore I buy, can you please clarify the following for me:

  1. Is the PSD65 UPS compatible with Network UPS Tools (NUT)
  2. Can I put a powerboard into one of the poser outlets to power the two SATA drives?

Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

2

Hi Peter,

I’ve had a quick look through the NUT docs on supported devices, and unfortunately it is not listed:

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You might want to check whether the PowerShield software will run on a Pi, as it’s available on Linux

Keen to see how you go with this as I run my own NAS on a Pi and it works well, but isn’t very redundant. Another thing you may want to consider, is that MicroSD cards have a nasty habit of failing out of the blue. Ideally, you’d boot of USB (as you can now do this on a Pi4) But with only 2 USB 3.0 ports this rules out redundancy on your drives.

Keen to see what you end up going with!
-James

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3

Thanks for the research and thoughts James.
I will follow up on these and certainly let you know how I go. Can I ask what drives/apacoty/config you are using for your NAS?
Thanks
Peter

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4

Hi Peter,

I use a simple samba on top of mdadm setup for RAID 1 on 2 USB 3.5" 8TB HDDs. While the SD card isn’t particularly robust, and the drives are only consumer-grade, it’s worked fine for me so far.

The only thing I’ve had trouble with is Windows needing authentication each time I start up my PC, I got around this with disabling security, but this is obviously not ideal. This may be a symptom of my Education Win10 licence

Keen to see how you go with this one!
-James