Raspberry Pi 4 - Simple NAS using usb3 external drives

[pauldun170]

Finally got around to finding another use for our living room Pi4 (Currently running Kodi and Pi hole on Rasbian)
It's sitting in Flirc Case hidden away in the corners of the TV stand.

Our ancient DNS-325 has served us well for years but its reliance on SMB1 and slow speeds is enough to inspire messing around a bit with alternatives.

1x Cheapo USB3 external drive enclosure housing a 1tb Black
1x 8tb WD Easystore

Cheapo Trendnet Gigabit switch, tested from 3900x on a Aurus Elite x570 running current Windows 10 home

Using some ancient copy of Lan Speed Test to generate a 1gb test file


DNS-325
Write speeds - 39.625 MB/s
Read speeds - 26.125 MB/s

Raspberry Pi 4 - 1 TB WD Black (from 2012 ish?) in a Vantec NexStar enclosure. (Formated ext4)
Write speeds - 60.625 MB/s
Read speeds - 100.625 MB/s

Raspberry Pi 4 - 8tb WD EasyStore (Formatted ext4)
Write speeds - 67.75 MB/s
Read speeds - 103.5 MB/s

It's not all poops and giggles.
There is a delay before the party starts as the drives spinning up. Where the DNS-325 might take 8 seconds to respond to an initial connection, the EasyStore drive take about 15 seconds. after that initial connection everything is fine. Might grab one of the other Raspebery Pi 4's in the house and try more serious experimentation.

At the very least, I now have another place to hoard backups and other crap.

Eventually I will bite the bullet and pick up a proper NAS unit...eventually.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Finally got around to finding another use for our living room Pi4 (Currently running Kodi and Pi hole on Rasbian)
It's sitting in Flirc Case hidden away in the corners of the TV stand.

Our ancient DNS-325 has served us well for years but its reliance on SMB1 and slow speeds is enough to inspire messing around a bit with alternatives.

1x Cheapo USB3 external drive enclosure housing a 1tb Black
1x 8tb WD Easystore

Cheapo Trendnet Gigabit switch, tested from 3900x on a Aurus Elite x570 running current Windows 10 home

Using some ancient copy of Lan Speed Test to generate a 1gb test file


DNS-325
Write speeds - 39.625 MB/s
Read speeds - 26.125 MB/s

Raspberry Pi 4 - 1 TB WD Black (from 2012 ish?) in a Vantec NexStar enclosure. (Formated ext4)
Write speeds - 60.625 MB/s
Read speeds - 100.625 MB/s

Raspberry Pi 4 - 8tb WD EasyStore (Formatted ext4)
Write speeds - 67.75 MB/s
Read speeds - 103.5 MB/s

It's not all poops and giggles.
There is a delay before the party starts as the drives spinning up. Where the DNS-325 might take 8 seconds to respond to an initial connection, the EasyStore drive take about 15 seconds. after that initial connection everything is fine. Might grab one of the other Raspebery Pi 4's in the house and try more serious experimentation.

At the very least, I now have another place to hoard backups and other crap.

Eventually I will bite the bullet and pick up a proper NAS unit...eventually.

I bought a QNAP in 2010-2011 and hadn't powered it on in years. It took some time to get it up on the latest code but, they are still supporting it. I'd probably go with qnap if you buy one for that reason.

 

[pauldun170]

Updates
DNS-325 with 2x4TB drives
Pi4 #1 with a 8TB easy store and a 1TB WD in a uasp dock mentioned in OP
Pi4 #2 with a 3TB Easy Store and 1TB WD in a uasp dock

Installed Openmediavault on Pi#2
Set up a union files system to combine the 3TB and the 1TB for a 4TB share
Set up remote mounts of the DNS-325 shares.

Clients now access the old DNS-325 through a OMV hosted share and now there are now SMB1 has been taken out of the picture. All clients connect to OMV over SMB3 and OMV handles the ancient SMB1 connection. The obvious tradeoff is on write performance but read performance is ok enough. For the usage it typically sees nowadays, no one in the house is going to notice.

The performance on the Pi #2 hosted union share surpasses both the Pi#1 setup and obviously the native DNS-325 performance.
I'm using rsync through OMV to sync up directories on the dns-325 with the easystore and so far so good.

Looks like I will be pushing off purchasing a new NAS for awhile. At he very least, when I do pick one up I'll probably put the Raspberry Pis to work to handle backups, redundancy and all that fun stuff.
If all goes well in testing and tweaking I might tear it all down and build an actual long term setup.

At the very least, it was super simple to get Openmediavault running on the Pi4 and so far its been very straight forward to put solutions in place.

 

[pauldun170]

Update: Little raspberry still going.
Only issue is I keep forgetting to update it.

 

[thedighubs]

Hello dear pauldun170 ,

Many thanks for the awesome thread with all the sharing of your thoughts and experiences. This is very helpful -sure not only for me but ( as I guess ) for many others of the community.

At the very least, it was super simple to get Openmediavault running on the Pi4 and so far its been very straight forward to put solutions in place.

Thanks for this. It's very encouraging.

Cheers 👋