I built the fastest Raspberry Pi SATA RAID NAS!

I built the fastest (to my knowledge) native SATA RAID array on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and set it up as a NAS server, testing out hard drives and SSDs, and different RAID setups like RAID 0, 1, and 10.

I discuss the advantages of different RAID levels, how to install and configure Samba and NFS, and benchmark everything, from drive to RAID performance, energy efficiency, temperatures, and more!

Products mentioned in this video (some links are affiliate links):

#RaspberryPi #NAS #RAID

Contents:

00:00 - Pi CM4 SATA Support
00:50 - Baseline SATA performance
02:49 - Learning about RAID
07:19 - HDD RAID with mdadm
10:47 - SSD RAID 10 Performance
13:42 - NAS with Samba and NFS
18:15 - Thermals and Energy Efficiency
19:33 - Summary and bloopers

[none]

Back in 1988 I ran Fault-Tolerant Netware 386 using raid one in hardware, mirrored and duplexed across controllers with battery backup power. That was state of the art at that time and ran like a top!

[felixal]

I love this video it's very detailed. Maybe I'll set it up like this someday

[SchoolforHackers]

S-class expertise here, Jeff. I love being able to point students at you in total confidence.

[tejonBiker]

This continuos testing of pci Port are top edge knowledge, keep the good Job!

[ninline]

I love the way you keep pushing the Pi to its limits.

[rickharms]

My first computer was an Apple II, 1979. I had two, 5.25” floppy drives. I was There were no such thing as hard drives. The world has changed, you are so lucky now.

[matthewfranklin]

Until recently I had a long career working in Storage and Backup technology, working with enterprises at Petabyte scale. RAID5 and RAID6 were most commonly used, RAID10 (i.e. RAID 1+0 stripe of mirrors) for performance.

I've never heard of issues related to parity..

[moahammadmohammad]

This is what I subscribed for. Pushing the limits of sensibility to GO ULTRA SPEED.

[bmanske]

I would like to add that a backup copy automatically synced by rsync, Resilio Sync, etc is NOT a backup. Any mistake, will be immediately propagated to the synced "backup". I once entered some VPN commands to mount remote disks "something unknown" happened and my sync program still saw the disk but couldn't see the files, Viola! Everything gone. Real backups to the rescue. I've never seen anything like that problem since but it only takes once.

I have amassed about 30TB of plex data and for the times when 3 or 4 people use it simultaneously, spinning platters are fast enough and more cost efficient than SSD.

RAID is not a backup, but it is a tremendous time saver. A disk fails and you can throw a new disk in (certain variations excluded) and it rebuilds without serious outage. Big savings over rebuilding the array and copying 30TB.

Really a lot of great info in this video. Thanks Jeff

[jonnypeace]

I'm glad to hear what you said about Raid 5. I used a snapraid parity system (i think its basically raid 5), worked well for years, was able to replace faulty drives.. until the disaster happened. Two faulty drives at the same time, and myself the brains behind this operation only had one parity disk (and the parity disk failed alongside that other disk). I couldn't recover the data, but thankfully i did keep copies elsewhere. Since then, i scaled my server back to using a pi4 (it was new at the time and thought it was worth a try now it had gigabit networking), and i put a little script writing knowldge into an rsync smartctl cronjob (you could obviously run the script outside cron, but this saves me remembering). Now i have full data available in the event of failure, and best of all (i hope), rsync won't write bad data to the backup drives if smartctl has bad health on any drive. I set up a mail server to keep me in the loop as well. Of course, i still have data stored elsewhere, but after the pitfalls i experienced with Raid 5, i think this is better for my needs, and the pi4 seems to be operating this well. I just use USB 3 docks for WD red drives and it makes for an easy to manage small scale home set up.

[jacoza]

Let's all repeat this mantra together... "RAID is NOT a backup. RAID is NOT a backup. RAID is NOT a backup."

[murraydelk]

Damn, a lot of content from you now! Awesome 👏

[Bennyboy-dog]

Brilliant Jeff! Really looking forward to the ZFS on Pi videos.

[Angeltech]

Hell yes Jeff, I love this kind of content.

[nicholasmatthews]

I like how YouTube shows me it was uploaded 33 seconds ago. Hope you are doing well in these trying times Jeff! Have a good day!

[derekgoodwine]

Excellent project with excellent reporting!

[Rick-vmbl]

Heads up to anyone wanting to try this, the iocrest sata board is available under a ton of names, I've got a few of them knocking around and they are absolutely identical. If you go on your countries amazon store and search for 'sata pcie card' you can almost guarantee to see a handful of them under different brands on the first page. As of writing, on the UK Amazon store it's sold as a Sybia SI-PEX40064 among others. There's also a version which appears to have the same profile and chipset but is a black pcb, these are sold for a bit more.

Now, we just need someone to design an awesome 3d printed case to hold the drives and pi dev board :D

[roccocoetzee]

Hi Jeff... I just wanted to say I enjoy your videos very much. I'm new to all of this Pi stuff but feel you explain everything very well. Thanks again.

[JoSe-csip]

I really loved this investigation. So on point of what I needed to know.

[proximacentaur]

Great video. Really concise delivery and packed with good information. Subscribed!