Build a Raspberry Pi NAS with 4 Hard Drives and RAID

The Raspberry Pi 4 has great I/O performance with USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet. That makes it ideal for a Do-It-Yourself NAS (Network Attached Storage). If you connect 1, 2 or even 4 hard drives, what kind of read/write performance will you get? What levels of RAID should you use? Let's find out.

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[edparadox]

Tittle is miss leading. Title implies a tutorial of building a rpi nas. This gives speed test results of different HD configurations.
Useful information but not why I started this video.
Rename this so it describes Video appropriately.

[SkashTheKitsune]

let me fix your title "Gary explains data of Networking with Raspberry Pi" there... you're welcome...

[jvinsnes]

I just watched a 14min video waiting for him to actually build a nas...

[NotSoCrazyNinja]

Pleeze, the nerd solution to NAS, which I have nicknamed the NASty is to get an old desktop computer, whatever you have laying around. Then figure out how many hard drives you can connect inside the case. Then salvage every hard drive you can find that is "decent enough" and shove them all inside. Load Linux and do some network wizardry and you have yourself a NASty for free. You can get a little fancy with this if you want, or you could go full-on nasty and just have each drive shared on the network.

[CompandAudioengineer]

Hi Gary,

Great video.
I just wondered what would happen if you would take 2 powered usb hubs attached to 2 different ports on the pi with a raid 10 setup.
Would this increase the R/W speed or is the bottleneck dependent on the raspi internals?

Thanks for your answer :)

[TheOriginalVersatile]

Agree with misleading title, build equals guide or tutorial and this isn’t it

[knjpollard]

Raid 1 works great for file serving. I use an externally powered, Sabrient dual SATA III usb 3 system. I have two 7200 RPM drives in there now just because I had them on hand.

I can connect from Windows, iPhone, iPad, Raspbian or whatever.

I tried putting own cloud over top of that but just found it largely unnecessary for basic file serving. I may try it again with K3 and Docker.

I boot to the other USB 3 port on 120 SSD from western digital. Pi4 is powering the USB boot drive. But if I place a microSD in the pi it automatically use it instead.

[antonsurviyanto]

where is the Build a Raspberry Pi 4 NAS tutorial, Sir?

[jeschinstad]

If you're going to do this, be aware that your USB-SATA device maybe doesn't support SMART or have incomplete support. And when the time comes to rebuild, you'll probably want to have a PC with some SATA ports available.

[Alan.livingston]

I have a Frankenserver that does something similar to this but uses LVM to tie the drives together. In this way I can create some large areas for storage that aren’t mirrored but then I can also create areas that are double or triple mirrored across the drives. It’s seemingly a good way to use up all those disparate old drives that collect about the place. No idea what the performance is like though as I basically just use it for warm archiving.

[prestigefleet]

Actually in OpenMediaVault you cannot run Raid Arrays through USB on a Raspberry Pi4 because it is considered to be unreliable. The Argon EON is a great example of this because though you can fit 2x 3.5 and 2x 2.5 Hard Drives, they are recognized as individuals, yes, but when you click on raid, it shows as not available.

[VK-qfqi]

Nice presentaion but it stands more in the performance perspective ..and while thinking of something what about if you have set a healthy raid (any level) with 2, 3 or 4 hdds plugged in the usb hub and the cleaning lady accidentally unplug them all while pi is off and replug them in any (wrong) order in the hub? Is actually the pi able to assort each disk as the correct raid member or will set the raid and the raid volume down.. and will ask for rebuilding array or re-create it?

[batesyboy]

Nicely explained video. But what about raid 5 across 4 disks..?

[iuhere]

the quality of your audio while shooting in front of camera is better, than that recording while screen capturing/recording. Also the audio seems unnatural while screen recording. Please continue using same mic/audio setup for desktop recording session as well. Thanks for the informative video and your time and effort being put up to compare these, much appreciated. :)

[j.d.]

Great experiment! Is the atolla USB hub UASP compatible?

[AndersJackson]

If you tried NFS you would probably got much better performance when reading and writing over network.
Reading and writing from /dev/zero and /dev/null wold be even faster.. ;-)

What about RAID 5 and RAID 6? Or even BTRFS or ZFS, which have RAID and LVM2 in them.



RAID and Backup, as you mentioned in the end is clearly not the same. Backup is saving data from accidental removing/overwriting. RAID "only" save you from loosing a disk.

[RapidFire]

I'm looking to create a RAID 1 setup using two M.2 SSDs on my Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB). I already have the Geekworm X1004 adapter. What software would you recommend for setting up the RAID 1 and creating a private cloud using Nextcloud? Could you provide a step-by-step guide or even a video tutorial on how to do this, including how to access the Nextcloud with RAID protection?

My goal is to move away from Google Drive and Google Photos.

Additionally, I'm interested in having multiple Raspberry Pi 5 devices in different locations for data redundancy. For example, one at my house, one at my parents', and another at my grandmother's. If one fails, I'll still have my data available on another device. Is it possible to create a RAID 1 configuration across multiple Raspberry Pi 5 devices?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[evanathea]

Thanks for the great videos. I didn't think it was a good idea to run RAID over USB but have I got that wrong? If it's ok then I'm thinking of doing this but with a dumb 3.5" 4 bay USB 3 enclosure and connecting that to the Pi. The Pi will just see 4 drives and then I'll use OMV to RAID them. Is it ok to have the RAID hardware connected to the RAID software via USB in this manner?

[nls]

Very helpful indeed, but for me, I didn't think it would be worth the effort to create a RAID 1.
Can you please make a video about this "night job"? Do you use anything else or just Task Scheduler?

[MartinMeyer]

Great video! But I don't understand why the writing on the raid 0 and raid 1 configuration is limited to 57 MB/s. Is the ethernet port or the samba protocol limiting the speed?