Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi for a DIY NAS ?

[Marus]

.

 

[GHammer]

Which Orange Pi? I've had one that throttled due to heat. Reading a few reviews, while less expensive, you're pretty much left on your own.
I did get a NanoPi R4S and it was really nicely put together, ran Armbian, never broke a sweat with anything I threw at it.
With the Raspberry, you have LOTS of support and software options. But, as you said, scarce as hen's teeth.

 

[Tech Junky]

I don't think it matters as much as the os you choose. Sure omv gives you a pretty GUI but, you could just use any Debian based os and install webmin to manage it. I would personally opt for something a little more integrated with less cables and hubs involved. Shuck the drives and put them in a cage with a backplane. For the price of Pi's getting a cheap sff PC might be the better option and you could port it to a bigger case and pop the drives inside of it.

 

[L&LD]

QNAP and Synology make a better NAS. DIY Pi's are not for important data, IMO.

What is this data you're storing on the USB drives (a known, horrendously error-prone, and here-today/gone-tomorrow storage 'solution')?

With 3 (standalone) USB drives are you backing them up to something more robust?

 

[sfx2000]

QNAP and Synology make a better NAS. DIY Pi's are not for important data, IMO.

I agree - a two bay NAS is engineered to fit a solution...

any DYI NAS type devices are a 30/30 warranty on your data stored - 30 feet or 30 seconds - after that, one is on their own...

 

[Clark Griswald]

Eon Pi NAS
This enclosure seemed promising, until Pi boards became scarce.

I use a Synology DS 918+ as my NAS, and I have no complaints.

 

[Tech9]

any DYI NAS type devices are a 30/30 warranty on your data stored

Disagree. It can be >2x faster than consumer boxes and less vulnerable at the same price. Popular consumer boxes are frequently targeted and successfully hacked. Examples with all cheap Synology, QNAP, WD models. The more popular the device is the greater chance to be attacked.

 

[Tech Junky]

The more popular the device is the greater

Target it becomes.

If there's a large footprint of devices it becomes more of a target.

It can be >2x faster than consumer boxes and less vulnerable at the same price.

Considering some NAS boxes run $1000+ and have desktop CPUs in them diy makes more sense. You have more flexibility in how many drives, speeds, and NIC options.

My diy does 400mb/s and with the 5ge nic that's a usable number not constrained by a backplane or cheap NIC.

 

[Tech9]

My diy does 400mb/s

I’m pretty sure I can run with a USB stick around and do better average transfer speed.

 

[Tech Junky]

I’m pretty sure I can run with a USB stick around and do better average transfer speed.

MB/s not mbps. Only USB stick I can / have that does more is the SanDisk Extreme Pro which runs as an SSD not detachable.

It wasn't directed at you anyway, just confirming DIY does better than prefab.

I have other drives though that blow away the "NAS" function so, not too concerned with your USB STICK.

 

[Crimliar]

I'll add a slightly different viewpoint. If you are looking for a pure NAS, then go with a NAS device!
If you are looking to experiment and learn though, an SBC may be the way to go. In that case, if it's your first SBC I'd definitely go with the Raspberry Pi thanks to the community support. But if you've already got some SBC experience under your belt then sure, try a more exotic piece of kit - just so long as you can get the full package (case, PSU, fans, etc).

 

[Tech9]

MB/s not mbps.

I was a little concerned about the correct units used or the Shift key not working on your keyboard.

 

[Tech Junky]

I was a little concerned about the correct units used or the Shift key not working on your keyboard.

Was being lazy on the phone and didn't feel like correcting it.

 

[Tech Junky]

USB - SanDisk Extreme Pro - ~400MB/s
USB Enclosure - 1GB/s
TB4 Enclosure - 3GB/s

Of course for network shares you're only limited by your imagination and how much $$$ you want to spend on it though. With an unlimited budget you can hit TB/s like enterprise storage wholesalers with hyper scaling.

As @Crimliar points out though if you want a "NAS" as most think of them where you take the enclosure out of the box and slot some HDDs into it and power it on that's one thing. Using alternate means though offers flexibility when it comes to drives/NIC/speed. The problems with NAS's these days or for the time they've been around is you're constrained by what the OEM decides to offer for performance. They're made with the cheapest parts possible and price extremely high compared to what you get unless you're a moron and can't figure out how to share drives on a network. There might be ~$50 worth of components in a typical cheap NAS and people pay $200+ for substandard hardware because they can't spend 5 minutes on google to figure out how to build their own.

PI might not be the best option but, it's an option.

Taking a PC and putting *nix on it and configuring samba isn't that big of a hurdle. Now, if you want external access and want to keep it locked down so you don't get probed or wiped that's another hurdle to overcome. Sharing over the internet means taking on liability for your data or transferring liability to a cloud entity to protect it. The 2nd is the easier option though it comes with a monthly cost to get that protection and reliability. Pairing a NAS with a cloud provider as a backup or externally reachable destination for your data is up to you though. Trusting these NAS OEM's though is getting harder to put faith in them with the mentioned issues and the not mentioned issues.

Everyone has different views though on how to approach data hoarding and sharing. There are tons of threads all over the place to suggest ways of doing things though.

The options to do it though are limited....
Buy a NAS
Make a NAS
Make a hybrid solution

About the only thing that remains constant is the price of drives not included in the price of the enclosure.

 

[Tech Junky]

OpenMediaVault could I get a cable transfer rate of 100 MB/s?

Depends on the drives. Not all USB drives are made equally. If you can get that speed or higher from a direct USB connection then it might be possible to get ~96MB/s across a gig port.

 

[Crimliar]

Actually sounds like the Raspberry Pi 4 could be an ideal plaything for you! While it has a 1Gbps ethernet port you'll be lucky to get anything that performs any processing to hit half of that sustained. It's not so much a limit on the port, so much the processing power of the Pi.

*I'm not knocking the Pi here. I've one right here in my living room, running 24/7 with just a passive cooling clamshell case. It makes a great little low-power, completely silent, little server!

 

[Tech9]

Do you think that with Raspberry Pi 4 and OpenMediaVault could I get a cable transfer rate of 100 MB/s?

If you are planning to use USB drives better look at off-lease HP EliteDesk mini or DELL OptiPlex mini. You can have reliable Intel i5-class CPU plus 8GB RAM hardware for the same price as currently overpriced Raspberry Pi kits. Much faster than Pi and still power efficient and compact. I've got one i5-6500T with 8GB RAM recently for $120, power supply and 256GB SSD included. Idles at 12W and runs completely silent. The little fans turn on only at load.

Yes, you can have full Gigabit speeds to your drives and you can run NAS software of your choice. All drives now can do 100MB/sec read speeds.

 

[Tech Junky]

All drives now

Since the drives weren't specified that's just an buttumption. Spinners at this point using dual actuators can hit SATA SSD speeds if you can get your hands on them. The USB drives the OP may be OLD or they might have SSD's inside the case. Speed of the port minus overhead equals up to ~96MB/s depending on the drives being used and if they hit 100MB/s. Some USB enclosures of the past use crappy controllers and don't support full speed of the drives inside of them.

 

[Tech9]

Since the drives weren't specified that's just an buttumption.

Yes, I'm assuming newer drives for NAS use and not 10-years old ones.

 

[Tech9]

You can get the maximum speed the drives are capable of. The portable ones are with built in drive USB controller.