A number of comments have asked about using a 2.5 Gbps USB 3 Ethernet adapter instead of the PCIe switch, which would allow me to run the disks at PCIe Gen 3 speed. I tested that with a Plugable 2.5G adapter (which is plug and play on the Pi 5), and you're right! I got 270 MB/sec writes for a 50 GB test folder, and 200 MB/sec reads. Check out the GitHub issue linked in the description for all the details. This little NAS just keeps getting better :)
@@JeffGeerling > It really is amazing for checking heat on a PCB. Love that feature. They're also good for opening a keypad lock if you don't know the code. If you can access the lock shortly after someone has used it you know which pads they touched, and big hints about the sequence from how much each one has cooled.
Jeff: ‘this won’t be as janky as my previous Pi NAS projects’ 20 minutes later Jeff: ‘I’m just casually spreading 4 PCBs across my desk with 3 different ribbon cables hoping that PCIe won’t break on me’ 😂
It's exciting to see such good results from the Penta SATA hat, I picked one up a few days ago and am working on a 3D printed enclosure for it and the Pi 5. I hadn't thought to try to add 2.5G networking, that's something that the Pi has lacked when compared to come RK3588 based SBC options.
About cooling. Create a wider space between the boards. Get a wire wrap female header. Clip the leads to make it a 2x?? spacer and get longer hex studs to separate the boards. Provides better cooling for the Pi as well. Great video.
I love how you took something that you said was not going to be jenky like some of your Raspberry Pi 4 attempts, and ended up making it jenky anyway to get the 2.5 networking working.
@@JeffGeerling I would have just gone full DIY and built my own wooden case. Non-conductive material, good looking. Maybe a few perforations and some small and quiet maglev fan on top at lowest RPM to cool the entire thing.
@@shapelessed You want a conductive material. Shielding is required for consumer PC's but because this is DIY it gets missed a lot. Processors put off EMI which can cause minor interference with wifi, bluetooth, etc and can cause other issues. That is why the FCC has guidelines, it's less of an issue the less energy is used but I'd still prefer some metal lining inside the wooden case. Plus if you're building an all SSD NAS might as well and make it as EMP resistant as possible.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket I have already once built a similar NAS and the EMI has never yet been a problem, since the SoC only drew like 2W at highest and the drives were already shielded. But if it's such an issue, a metal mesh would probably be enough for any radiation the PI might produce. In fact, many small 4-port routers and APs commonly use plastic cases to help with signal strength, and they usually throw off more electricity into the air than the PI would.
@@shapelessed I'd love to get a laser cutter and design some simple wood cases that can pop together. That or acrylic... someday. For now I do 3D prints for things I deploy more permanently, I might do that with this build.
I've been checking thrice daily for when this would drop (as my penta hat has been in the mail for a week now). Thanks as always for the service you provide to the community Jeff!
Thanks Jeff for your great content. I’ve been accumulating parts for my Pi NAS for about three months now, finally assembled it over the weekend and got OMV to install (after multiple tries) this morning. Since then, I’ve been playing with plug-ins and configurations (RAID 5 and then ZFS setups). Your informative narrative style has made Pi projects understandable and accessible, even for this 58-year old. I found your series on Pi clusters (you look so much younger!), and decided that’ll be my project to get me through the winter months. Cheers!
Really loving the miniturization of these setups, size and power. It makes me wonder how well this would work in a Van. Seems like a perfect use case for portable storage on the go.
This is fascinating for this old man. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with a _massive_ 1k of RAM. I did buy the 16k expansion module though, so I was fine. *LOL* When I finally got a 'real' computer with a "mass" storage device, it was a PC /XT Tubo IBM clone, with an unbelievably large Seagate ST-212, 10 *meg.* (not gig) hard drive. Things have changed a bit. 😆 Thanks for the great video(s).
Your story mirrors mine except I started out with a TRS-80 Mod 1. My first "IBM" was an Hyundai XT Clone with a whole 640k of RAM and a $500 10 mb 'hard card.' Thing cost $1200 without the drive. Twin floppies and 4 colors on your monitor whether you used them or not!
@@DocKingliveshere I started out learning on a PDP 111 (at my dad's office -- Puget Utilities District (PUD)). Our first home PC was a TRS 80 with a cassette drive. I think we had 16k of ram. It was top-of-the-line at that time. My friends were jealous. The change has been mind-blowing.
@@JeffGeerling makes sense, if it's maxing out all disks and PCI bus riser at 100% CPU all cores for the checksum computations, rather than having to divide time in the PCI bus between writing bits to disks and reading from the NIC. a quick look with powertop should solve the mystery.
@@JeffGeerling 20W is only a 1.7 amp load on that PSU I really think your 5A supply is overkill, thats 60 watts, plenty even for 2.5" mechanical drives. What we really need to know is how much power can the 12v to 5v reg on the SATA board handle, that will be the bottleneck. Plugging in a larger brick is not going to increase the capabilites of whats on the PCB.
Hey Jeff, I’m not sure what options you set up in samba but because Apple reasons there are a number of Apple specific samba options you need to set in order for SMB to be competitive on MacOS. It’s all a bit of a black art, but the main settings can make a really big difference before getting into the weird ones.
Jeff, you're absolutely right. I've got an Infiray P2Pro too. The software isn't as slick as my Flir One Pro, but man, the image quality is miles better. Plus, it's a lot cheaper than Flir.🤣
I think this was an extremely practical experiment. Also, I like to let you know that you don’t need to be practical with your experiments because I enjoy all your experiments and the more bizarre and impractical they are, the more I like them.
Red Shirt Jeff has Jeff's mannerisms and voice down pretty well, and is not nearly as manic as 'normal'. Gotta be careful, he might be able to take over the channel!
Tq Jeff. Re: Heat-sink mutilation.... I suggest people use extra or longer 'stand-offs' a.k.a. 'spacers' / 'hex-spacers' to increase the height between the two boards. If using a longer spacer, you'll probably need female-female spacers. If extending the existing ones you'll probably need a small male-female spacer.
Thanks again Jeff for doing all these exploratory projects AND (!!) documenting them so well. I've been following your stuff since ~2006 or so Drupal 5 was still in beta and using Views was a bleeding-edge struggle and often the only way to do something. Then you're there again for Ansible, Docker, then kubernetes, and the Pi.
This takes me back to the days of when I was building NAS devices with early linux distros and random hard drives. It was basically all trial and error. Learned a ton but man, did I spin a lot of wheels just split balling to see if I could make it work. I love these "let's just see if this work" vids.
I love this build! I have the Radxa Pi 4 Quad NAS as my home NAS right now, so once the case and cooling top HAT come out, I may upgrade. (I recently bit the bullet and backed a NAS Kickstarter for the convenience.) I wanted to check on, as well, on how you’re feeling. You look pretty good in this video, so that’s encouraging! (And, I completely understand that you’re sick of answering, “How are you feeling?” Even though people are well-intentioned, it can be a lot when everyone asks. So, feel free to ignore this question - I get it.) Thanks for sharing your experience with the new SATA HAT, though! I can’t wait to upgrade!
This video gave me confidence to pull the trigger. Just ordered my first ever Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi 5/8GB $162.48 CAD Penta SATA HAT $62.55 usd = $88.90 CAD 12V 10A Power Adapter $30 CAD Total $281.38 CAD before drives Excited to put together my first NAS.
What I love about this channel is that inexperienced technicians like me get to learn figure out stuff with Jeff during the video. He did it twice here by not reading manuals and documentation during the build and also when he couldn't find how to set up an array other than ZFS
You see the new radxa rock 5C and 5C lite? A raspberry pi 5 competitor, price is less than the pi 5 with rk 3588 (5C) or an another version without gpu and with 6 core. (5C lite)
They look like good options, though at the same price points, the value is a little reduced. The 5C 2GB is probably the sweet spot if you want to get into that board, and don't need more than 2 GB of RAM. The Lite model is going to be a bit more annoying in terms of overall performance and desktop use, but could work out well in places where you don't need tiny desktop performance.
The issue with these PI competitors I find to be quite frequent is the utterly nonexistant software support. They either die off or shift the software support to some newer generations. There are driver issues and a bunch more problems. Sure, they are great, because they keep the PI foundation moving forward through competition, but I'd still pay a few dollars more to get a PI and a known ecosystem, with well-known and established software.
LTT did a video on the CM3588 with 4 M.2 drives. He showed an adapter to go from one M.2 to 5 SATA drives. I'd LOVE to see a NAS with that but maxed out with 20 drives and compare it to this Pi 5 NAS.
I had 0 idea what was going on this entire video but I randomly got recommended to your channel so I hope I can learn a bit more because I really like your way of explaining things.
Checked your blog as well Jeff. I'd feel quite proud achieving a such a NAS in that footprint. With a wood case perhaps even my wife would let me have it on display and brag about it. Keep on with the good work. Blessings
I've actually been working on that; I might only touch on backups in my first video explaining it. And that might come out next week, or the week after... finally started working on the video after having the testing done for like 2 months now lol.
@@JeffGeerling, good timing then, it would be good for you to touch on it and how to do to it, take your time on it though and do whatever is needed on it
Have you looked into PTP clocks on Pi5 yet? From what I've read we might be able to use a GPS module and produce a stable PTP clock source due to hardware changes/additions. I might have a need to switch from NTP to PTP for sync on Dante AV transmissions and also if NDI ever gets to PTP sync as well. PTP is required for SMPTE ST2110 (as far as I know).
Radxa ROCK 3A was perfect for this build, 2x pcie 3.0 and 1x pcie 2.1, ideal for top board and 2.5G ethernet, SoC is limiting RAID performace, but still well over 2.5G. setup uses about 8W (I'm running this it for a while). I'm using 4A 12V for power, less waste. eSata is yet another sata for 3.5" drive. Useful for external big hdd with power. Probably You are using OMV7 which moved mdadm to external plugin. That is why there was no such thing in menu, easy to add. Btw, more interesting is quad sata hat, uses two usb3 but has HW RAID. You will get pcie for 2.5g ethernet or even almost 10G. Also You can get opposite of that. Any RK3588 is way better, support pcie bifurcation so you can get 6x sata and 10G nic, already has 2.5G, wifi slot still free (another 2.5G nic or 2x sata, or coral tpu), also eMMC is just way better than sd card. Thanks for trying active cooler wit this hat so I dont need to reassembly mine with pi5, which I wanted to swap, but due to heavy jellyfin/plex problems its just bad idea.
I was so disappointed when you were doing the file copy with the Mac and benchmarking, glad you called it out at the end of the video lol, it actually has to do with SMB protocol and Apple. AFP/NFS on a Mac for benchmarking is totally fine, cheers
I think macOS does not support smb3… only smb2 I also have troubles with users and passwords Is there any complete guide to make samba or omv work 100% correctly with macOS?
@ 29:30 ZFS is cleaning up its write amplification mess (batch style after a big write, in this case 100Gbytes of data), so lots of reads, write overs and new writes for defrag going on, hence the sustained bigger power draw @ 22Watts, and more rapid aging of the media for which ZFS is so well known... ;/
Hello, from my experience, the connector to the expansion board has a latch that is not locked correctly. It would be best if you locked it above the connector of the expansion to prevent the flat from disconnecting!
I've built a NAS with this hat and Rock Pi 4B (that was long before Raspberry Pi 4 and Rock 4B does have that nvme slot with a few pcie lanes) but with 4 3.5” HDDs. Wiring them with SATA extender cables was funny, as the Chieftec chassis I've used has separate SATA data and power connectors. The 5V power supply on the hat is adequate: the datasheet for the step-down converter used on this hat specifies a maximum of 10A. So that's enough for the SBC and the drives (the 5V line is shared with SATA power). Overall a very solid and well-designed product. Too bad ARM means being limited to OpenMediaVault. It does run solid on Armbian so no quarrel here.
Linus had a pretty good video using that Rockchip NVME board. I think I like this solution being able to use 2.5" SATA drives due to cost per TB. Might have to build one of these! Well that is if and wen the Radxa boards show back up in stock.
@JeffGeerling, thanks for your review. You convinced me to build my first NAS! I ended up designing the case enclosure and uploading it to Maker World! Thanks!!
I'm not in favour of Raspberry Pi tinkering for the purpose of NAS because, I just found these ASRock N100 motherboards with built-in Intel processors. It's basically a whole mini PC on a single board, for like the same price as a decked-out Pi setup with a hard drive and all those extra hats. Think about it: No more messing with software compatibility or overheating issues. This ASRock board is a simple, low-power option that comes with everything pre-installed like sata ports. Plus, it has regular PC connections like HDMI and multiple USB ports, so you can hook it right up to your monitor and peripherals just like the pi.
@@cipnt I don’t think raspberry pi 5 with above configuration will consume 2 watts at idle. In the video at 24:11 you can see it is consuming 8 watts idle.
Yes, the RPi gets a crap by all means. My 5 (five) years old Odroid HC4 board has got both native PCIe and SATA connectors right on board just for $70.
That setup was boarder line red shirt Jeff territory lol, guess that's what you get combining 4 different manufacturers into one DIY product. Excellent documentation as always!
30:43 I had a bad feeling about using MacOS for file copy. But just using file managers in general for file copy (especially for network), I would try to avoid it and use raw commands as you don't exactly know what library/what it is using to perform the action.
24:58 didn''t watch everything yet, but before i forget, in OMV7 the software RAID management (mdadm) was moved to the plugin "openmediavault-md", or so i've heard.
OOOOH... so that explains why everyone's tutorial had it listed, but it's not in there by default? Seems a bit odd to take it out and not replace it with anything else for RAID, since that's my main use case for ever using OMV. The ZFS plugin seems mature enough, they could install that by default IMO.
Also the documentation seemed to indicate that the drives needed to be wiped before RAID would work -- I'm not sure if that meant that the RAID option wouldn't even show up (I assume the plugin would need to be installed still though).
They should use longer stand offs, and include a heat sync for that hot chip. Also, if there's a case it should then be taller. Maybe even a litter taller than it needs to be to perhaps fit a 2.5GbE adapter?
Comparing an off the shelf NAS with the Pi NAS, obviously you are buying something that's going work out of the box, but that's missing the point. The challenge of building your own is where the fun is, assuming the and result is reasonably successful.
How stable is this setup since filming this video? I have a 12yr old HP Microserver that’s happily been ticking away as a NAS but I’m looking for a reliable alternative to migrate to.
I've been running this setup since I made the video 24x7, and it's mostly just a backup target (ZFS replication) from my primary NAS, but it has not had an issue. I've only shut it down once to move it to my second rack a couple weeks ago (it was on my desk before that).
@@JeffGeerling thanks for the feedback, thats really helpful. My use case is more of a final resting place for backups of pictures & videos. I may try to set one of these up along with Plex to view the media on another PC/TV. 👍
I wonder if you would see any improvement, assuming it's possible, with bonding the 1G and 2.5G interfaces into a 10G switch? Also, you didn't mention anything about jumbo frames?
Jeff, you are always very thorough & realistic. We thank you for that. Other channels, not so much. Sets you apart from others by a significant margin. Excellent video. Thx
I have almost bought it a few times, but the total price of $180 or so including $40-50 shipping if I want it in less than a couple months keeps putting me off.
Wish there was a six bay version. I've got an old 6 bay NAS that I'd love to modify to run on a pi since the original hardware is getting too old. I think I could use extension cables to run from the hat to the back of the drive bays.
Ditto! I see a lot of potential in this form factor. Build up a case around it, and have a 2, 4, and 6-bay version, and I'd love to see that line be upgradeable with new Pi models over the years!
My immediate thought when you enabled the SMB sharing was "oh, so they have improved SMB speed with Macs". Nice you caught that and retested with windows. I use sftp when pushing high volume data between Mac and Linux on the home network.
MacOS Finder copies on SMB to samba in Linux can easily saturate 10G networking, but it seems (my working theory) is the finder is polling the remote server for updates a lot. So you need some addl CPU to handle the extra requests. Which likely the PI is running very close to its limits cannot handle without some slowdowns. Plus samba is single threaded per connection, so those extra requests take time away from the copy. But using a MacOS machine FOR benchmarking is real world if your intent is to use macOS as a client.
I presume this is pretty much meant for SSD NAS? Understood it supplies SATA and power, but the side of HDDs seems a bit large, and not sure if there's enough power.
Well, for me, this is a very professional presentation that I have seen here. All the details immediately inspire me to build the NAS. I will report how it worked for me. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to watch/listen to you.
@DonovanGoodwin I had 0 issues with my network storage, I've a homemade NAS + VPN server + DHCP + DNS server all server running on a raspberry pi al all my windows, Linux pcs and Samsung phones, work always 100% everywhere Im in the the world, I'm always connected to my home network, 0 issues so far and is running 24/7 for last 5 years... So, good luck with thise status apple things ahaahaha
@@primiSC exactly. In my personal life I use Android and Linux clients with my various NAS implementations. Thankfully never had any issues with those configurations. But with certain clients I found it impossible to provide their Apple products with NAS systems for backup and very unreliable solutions for mass file storage over the network. I'm glad I don't choose to deal with that at home😂
I wonder if this could stack with the Quad SATA hat. Technically the only thing restrictiong the stack order for the older HAT is the little USB 3.0 bridge they provide...
I might be wrong, but it appears the wider end of the ribbon cable isn't locked on the pcb. The metal locking connector rail on the ribbon cable is supposed to lock onto the pcb connector after you plug it in.
Really interesting setup, if one doesn't mind taking on the pain of setting up an ARM based NAS solution, this is pretty much as good as it gets, and for cheap. I have been doing a lot of research in this area as well, made a few videos too and generally always interested in finding cute little storage setups with huge capacities. I had a quick question, do you know if this SATA hat can be used directly through an USB/TBT interface somehow or can it be plugged to other computing boards (x86 as well)? Specifically, I was interested in learning the pinout details of the board which I couldn't find on their website. It would be really helpful if you can give details on the hardware specs of this SATA hat board which can have numerous interesting applications. Thanks again for the video!
This is indeed a nice project. Great to see how far the PIs came. ZFS on one of these, wouldn't have thought that that's even an option. However, for a DIY NAS I'd go with a used Server like a Fujitsu Primergy or similar for ~70€ and TrueNas. This will be better in every dimension except power consumption.
I've been considering putting a NAS together myself, and using a spare raspberry pi to do it. One of the major drawbacks I see is potential corruption of the SD card on power loss, then you're looking at either the additional cost of another drive to run it on, or a UPS to ensure consistent power delivery. It seems the benefits of the pi in this use case outweighed by how cheap and performant budget prebuilt machines are now. Pi is an excellent choice for other hobby applications, but it seems like the inferior option unless you're trying to achieve the highest possible power efficiency.
This is all crazy! I started with a Z-80 with 64k ram (actually had 128k that was bank switched) with a 256k TAPE drive, running CP/M! Got the optional single side disk drive with 130k available space (rewrote bios eeprom and disk format so i could get 160 k out of a disk). I was so jazzed when I got my first IBM clone 8086 with a whopping 27.5 Megabytes! of hard disk space! How would I ever fill THAT? Now, with 11 pi4's and a pi 5, with a total of over 5 tbytes of storage, and you are talking petabyte arrays, blows my mind! Subnote: at one point in my life, I worked in the National Semiconductor Corporation's international data center. They had "hard disk drives" that were the size of an apartment sized washing machines! The disc packs were hand swapped in the machines, to get data from archives to who ever needed it. Most of it was done at a blazing (at the time) at 2.4kb! Each disc pack held a whopping 80 megabytes! Times, they are a changing! Now, I'm thrilled to have
A number of comments have asked about using a 2.5 Gbps USB 3 Ethernet adapter instead of the PCIe switch, which would allow me to run the disks at PCIe Gen 3 speed.
I tested that with a Plugable 2.5G adapter (which is plug and play on the Pi 5), and you're right! I got 270 MB/sec writes for a 50 GB test folder, and 200 MB/sec reads. Check out the GitHub issue linked in the description for all the details.
This little NAS just keeps getting better :)
This is great! It's very compact as well. How do you think Pi RAM impacts on speeds?
Would be interesting if you could combine it with the nvme hat and boot from a nvme. Should be more reliable and faster than the micro sd card?
pi nas gonna be more expensive than buying a synology soon lol
What's the RAM usage?
@@automatedrussianbot Not really. You're buying the parts that you can upgrade later.
Came here for the Pi NAS, stayed for the "I MUST HAVE IT" thermal camera. That snap on lens blew me away.
It really is amazing for checking heat on a PCB. Love that feature.
@@JeffGeerling
> It really is amazing for checking heat on a PCB. Love that feature.
They're also good for opening a keypad lock if you don't know the code. If you can access the lock shortly after someone has used it you know which pads they touched, and big hints about the sequence from how much each one has cooled.
@@anonnona8099 do you where i can get that thermal sensor extension or how it is called pls?
@@realtarun IHNI - it's not my video
@@realtarun it's called 'InfiRay P2 Pro', costs around 250-300$ with different lenses
Jeff: ‘this won’t be as janky as my previous Pi NAS projects’
20 minutes later Jeff: ‘I’m just casually spreading 4 PCBs across my desk with 3 different ribbon cables hoping that PCIe won’t break on me’ 😂
That's not jank, it's creative chaos... /bs (it's jank...pure unadulterated jank.)
I really like the relaxed style with fewer cuts 👍
Jeff, you are simply becoming the go-to guy in the RPI community. Best videos out there covering RPI related stuff. Awesome work. Keep it up.
Ahm, it's been that way for years.
It's exciting to see such good results from the Penta SATA hat, I picked one up a few days ago and am working on a 3D printed enclosure for it and the Pi 5. I hadn't thought to try to add 2.5G networking, that's something that the Pi has lacked when compared to come RK3588 based SBC options.
Oh can't wait! Your enclosures are always ✨
Will you share the design on Printables? I would print it in a heartbeat!
@@JeffGeerling yes I'll share the design on Makerworld to print
Don't forget the fan
32tb NAS smaller than a brick, this is AWESOME!
(2) 20TB HDD is
@Googleplaybinauthority and far lower performance
@@rudeskalamanderin a raid 0, the performance would be able to saturate the 2.5g link. But then no redundancy.
What people do with nases that gigabit is not enough?
@@wytrzeszczwytrzeszcz7739 I know people who play all of their movies and games off a nas
About cooling. Create a wider space between the boards. Get a wire wrap female header. Clip the leads to make it a 2x?? spacer and get longer hex studs to separate the boards. Provides better cooling for the Pi as well. Great video.
So it's a.... NASberry Pi!
I dunno, a Pinas has a better ring to it. ❤
@@orangejjay If it were SCSI, you could call it a SNASberry.
NASty Pi
@@thedarbDo the SNASberries taste like SNASBerries?
@@Melechtna Oh they totally do! :D
I love how you took something that you said was not going to be jenky like some of your Raspberry Pi 4 attempts, and ended up making it jenky anyway to get the 2.5 networking working.
Hehe the jank must happen!
It was janky long before that, when he had to break off the fins on the heatsink just to fit the board that hold the SSDs.
Am I the only one in fierce love of these small-as-possible SSD file servers?
I love 'em too. Just wish they had their nice little metal case available, because I feel like that would complete this build!
@@JeffGeerling I would have just gone full DIY and built my own wooden case.
Non-conductive material, good looking. Maybe a few perforations and some small and quiet maglev fan on top at lowest RPM to cool the entire thing.
@@shapelessed You want a conductive material. Shielding is required for consumer PC's but because this is DIY it gets missed a lot. Processors put off EMI which can cause minor interference with wifi, bluetooth, etc and can cause other issues. That is why the FCC has guidelines, it's less of an issue the less energy is used but I'd still prefer some metal lining inside the wooden case.
Plus if you're building an all SSD NAS might as well and make it as EMP resistant as possible.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket I have already once built a similar NAS and the EMI has never yet been a problem, since the SoC only drew like 2W at highest and the drives were already shielded. But if it's such an issue, a metal mesh would probably be enough for any radiation the PI might produce.
In fact, many small 4-port routers and APs commonly use plastic cases to help with signal strength, and they usually throw off more electricity into the air than the PI would.
@@shapelessed I'd love to get a laser cutter and design some simple wood cases that can pop together. That or acrylic... someday. For now I do 3D prints for things I deploy more permanently, I might do that with this build.
I've been checking thrice daily for when this would drop (as my penta hat has been in the mail for a week now). Thanks as always for the service you provide to the community Jeff!
Ooh I also hear Michael Klements is working on a case design for this box!
Tip : tell kernel to clear caches between measurements
`sudo sync`
`sudo bash -c 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'`
Thanks Jeff for your great content. I’ve been accumulating parts for my Pi NAS for about three months now, finally assembled it over the weekend and got OMV to install (after multiple tries) this morning. Since then, I’ve been playing with plug-ins and configurations (RAID 5 and then ZFS setups). Your informative narrative style has made Pi projects understandable and accessible, even for this 58-year old. I found your series on Pi clusters (you look so much younger!), and decided that’ll be my project to get me through the winter months. Cheers!
My wife is going to be pissed at me spending so much time playing with my PiNAS. Thanks Jeff.
This may be the single greatest comment 😂😂
You should convince her to join you during playtime. Win win.
@@michaelinjapan6902this should win the title for greatest reply XD 😅
spanish speakers read PiNAS like piñas as in 🍍
Really loving the miniturization of these setups, size and power. It makes me wonder how well this would work in a Van. Seems like a perfect use case for portable storage on the go.
You gotta be careful not to say Pi NAS too quickly, lest we become confused about exactly what you're trying to build 😂
Big pi-nas fan
@@gunsnmammons Why. Just... why.
binance?
change the "we become.." to "kids become.."
peenus 😂😂😂
This is fascinating for this old man. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with a _massive_ 1k of RAM. I did buy the 16k expansion module though, so I was fine. *LOL* When I finally got a 'real' computer with a "mass" storage device, it was a PC /XT Tubo IBM clone, with an unbelievably large Seagate ST-212, 10 *meg.* (not gig) hard drive. Things have changed a bit. 😆
Thanks for the great video(s).
1K is good enough for everyone! :D
Your story mirrors mine except I started out with a TRS-80 Mod 1. My first "IBM" was an Hyundai XT Clone with a whole 640k of RAM and a $500 10 mb 'hard card.' Thing cost $1200 without the drive. Twin floppies and 4 colors on your monitor whether you used them or not!
@@JeffGeerling 😆 👍
@DocKingliveshere Ahh yes, the good ol' days. 🤣
@@DocKingliveshere I started out learning on a PDP 111 (at my dad's office -- Puget Utilities District (PUD)). Our first home PC was a TRS 80 with a cassette drive. I think we had 16k of ram. It was top-of-the-line at that time. My friends were jealous. The change has been mind-blowing.
Jeff bringing back YOLO for 2024.
BTW, experimental with pi builds is my favorite content on your channel. Keep them coming!
I followed your advice and have had my NAS running for 6 weeks flawlessly. Thanks!!!!!
That 20 watt spike at the end of the copy was ZFS flushing the write cache of all the data you sent to write.
Sounds plausible! It's a lotta wattage though, must be hammering everything at once!
@@JeffGeerling makes sense, if it's maxing out all disks and PCI bus riser at 100% CPU all cores for the checksum computations, rather than having to divide time in the PCI bus between writing bits to disks and reading from the NIC. a quick look with powertop should solve the mystery.
@@JeffGeerling 20W is only a 1.7 amp load on that PSU
I really think your 5A supply is overkill, thats 60 watts, plenty even for 2.5" mechanical drives.
What we really need to know is how much power can the 12v to 5v reg on the SATA board handle, that will be the bottleneck.
Plugging in a larger brick is not going to increase the capabilites of whats on the PCB.
Hey Jeff, I’m not sure what options you set up in samba but because Apple reasons there are a number of Apple specific samba options you need to set in order for SMB to be competitive on MacOS. It’s all a bit of a black art, but the main settings can make a really big difference before getting into the weird ones.
The year of Raspberry PI DIY NAS is getting closer and closer, I can smell it
Awesome video
The year of the PiNAS.
just like the year of the linux desktop?
Jeff, you're absolutely right. I've got an Infiray P2Pro too. The software isn't as slick as my Flir One Pro, but man, the image quality is miles better. Plus, it's a lot cheaper than Flir.🤣
Totally agree... but I reckon a software upgrade should fix that right up, then it'll be perfect.
@@YasmainHurley Hopefully... they seem to be focused on some new products this year, so I won't hold my breath for the software :(
I think this was an extremely practical experiment. Also, I like to let you know that you don’t need to be practical with your experiments because I enjoy all your experiments and the more bizarre and impractical they are, the more I like them.
My favourite saying related to DIY: If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Red Shirt Jeff has Jeff's mannerisms and voice down pretty well, and is not nearly as manic as 'normal'. Gotta be careful, he might be able to take over the channel!
Juggling chainsaws, touching live wires, installing OMV... just Red Shirt Jeff things.
Is Yellow shirt Jeff normal? And where does blue shirt Jeff fit into this video. (Yellow 0:00 Red 23:35 Blue 30:35)
Tq Jeff.
Re: Heat-sink mutilation....
I suggest people use extra or longer 'stand-offs' a.k.a. 'spacers' / 'hex-spacers' to increase the height between the two boards.
If using a longer spacer, you'll probably need female-female spacers.
If extending the existing ones you'll probably need a small male-female spacer.
Yellow shirt Jeff breaks fins off the heat sink.
Red shirt Jeff: "He took ma jarb!"
Notice that yellow shirt Jeff still advised against doing it yourself. He's like a mellowed-out version of the real deal.
Thanks again Jeff for doing all these exploratory projects AND (!!) documenting them so well. I've been following your stuff since ~2006 or so Drupal 5 was still in beta and using Views was a bleeding-edge struggle and often the only way to do something. Then you're there again for Ansible, Docker, then kubernetes, and the Pi.
We started in Drupal right around the same time!
This takes me back to the days of when I was building NAS devices with early linux distros and random hard drives. It was basically all trial and error. Learned a ton but man, did I spin a lot of wheels just split balling to see if I could make it work. I love these "let's just see if this work" vids.
I'll hopefully start doing the same with some weird radio projects soon too :D Love your channel!
I’d like to see a head to head with a similar priced/configured prebuilt NAS
I love this build! I have the Radxa Pi 4 Quad NAS as my home NAS right now, so once the case and cooling top HAT come out, I may upgrade. (I recently bit the bullet and backed a NAS Kickstarter for the convenience.)
I wanted to check on, as well, on how you’re feeling. You look pretty good in this video, so that’s encouraging! (And, I completely understand that you’re sick of answering, “How are you feeling?” Even though people are well-intentioned, it can be a lot when everyone asks. So, feel free to ignore this question - I get it.)
Thanks for sharing your experience with the new SATA HAT, though! I can’t wait to upgrade!
Feeling great! My new medication's been very good, minimal side effects, and I've finally had a whole year with no hospitalization... knock on wood!
@@JeffGeerling Oh, that’s amazing!
Great to hear it, as it’s hard to ask for more than that!
This video gave me confidence to pull the trigger. Just ordered my first ever Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi 5/8GB $162.48 CAD
Penta SATA HAT $62.55 usd = $88.90 CAD
12V 10A Power Adapter $30 CAD
Total $281.38 CAD before drives
Excited to put together my first NAS.
drives are the biggest cost lol
$300 is about the same as a dedicated nas.
@@teknoid5878 yeah but putting this together yourself and making it work was way more satisfying. Plus i can run pi-hole alongside it being a nas
@@minergate4066 Yes, i understand, im compelled with this idea. Maybe i'll try it if the whole setup cost 150-200.
I would love a CM5 motherboard in the future which is loaded with SATA ports and networking so that we can do these experiments all in one place...
Ditto!
What I love about this channel is that inexperienced technicians like me get to learn figure out stuff with Jeff during the video. He did it twice here by not reading manuals and documentation during the build and also when he couldn't find how to set up an array other than ZFS
You see the new radxa rock 5C and 5C lite? A raspberry pi 5 competitor, price is less than the pi 5 with rk 3588 (5C) or an another version without gpu and with 6 core. (5C lite)
They look like good options, though at the same price points, the value is a little reduced. The 5C 2GB is probably the sweet spot if you want to get into that board, and don't need more than 2 GB of RAM.
The Lite model is going to be a bit more annoying in terms of overall performance and desktop use, but could work out well in places where you don't need tiny desktop performance.
The issue with these PI competitors I find to be quite frequent is the utterly nonexistant software support. They either die off or shift the software support to some newer generations. There are driver issues and a bunch more problems.
Sure, they are great, because they keep the PI foundation moving forward through competition, but I'd still pay a few dollars more to get a PI and a known ecosystem, with well-known and established software.
Thanks!
This, this will be my first NAS project
LTT did a video on the CM3588 with 4 M.2 drives. He showed an adapter to go from one M.2 to 5 SATA drives. I'd LOVE to see a NAS with that but maxed out with 20 drives and compare it to this Pi 5 NAS.
If your pi NAS is bottlenecked, then clearly you just need a cluster of pi NASes with a distributed file system to fix it!
I like the way you think lol
23:20 linux had an update in the 6.13 kernel to make storage faster with less buffering, maybe that help the speed of the NAS
I love that you put it all together and THEN read the manual.
This is the way.
I had 0 idea what was going on this entire video but I randomly got recommended to your channel so I hope I can learn a bit more because I really like your way of explaining things.
For most home users that is more than adequate and the small size is a bonus.
Checked your blog as well Jeff. I'd feel quite proud achieving a such a NAS in that footprint. With a wood case perhaps even my wife would let me have it on display and brag about it. Keep on with the good work. Blessings
Whenever you do the Pi NVR, could you do something related to how to back up the system, like the recordings to a NAS?
I've actually been working on that; I might only touch on backups in my first video explaining it. And that might come out next week, or the week after... finally started working on the video after having the testing done for like 2 months now lol.
@@JeffGeerling, good timing then, it would be good for you to touch on it and how to do to it, take your time on it though and do whatever is needed on it
Have you looked into PTP clocks on Pi5 yet? From what I've read we might be able to use a GPS module and produce a stable PTP clock source due to hardware changes/additions. I might have a need to switch from NTP to PTP for sync on Dante AV transmissions and also if NDI ever gets to PTP sync as well. PTP is required for SMPTE ST2110 (as far as I know).
Yes, that's actually a topic I've been digging into lately. I just received a few devices which should help me with PTP debugging more, too!
Radxa ROCK 3A was perfect for this build, 2x pcie 3.0 and 1x pcie 2.1, ideal for top board and 2.5G ethernet, SoC is limiting RAID performace, but still well over 2.5G. setup uses about 8W (I'm running this it for a while). I'm using 4A 12V for power, less waste.
eSata is yet another sata for 3.5" drive. Useful for external big hdd with power.
Probably You are using OMV7 which moved mdadm to external plugin. That is why there was no such thing in menu, easy to add.
Btw, more interesting is quad sata hat, uses two usb3 but has HW RAID. You will get pcie for 2.5g ethernet or even almost 10G. Also You can get opposite of that.
Any RK3588 is way better, support pcie bifurcation so you can get 6x sata and 10G nic, already has 2.5G, wifi slot still free (another 2.5G nic or 2x sata, or coral tpu), also eMMC is just way better than sd card.
Thanks for trying active cooler wit this hat so I dont need to reassembly mine with pi5, which I wanted to swap, but due to heavy jellyfin/plex problems its just bad idea.
It needs to be able to power each drive up and down as needed to minimize power usage depending on application.
I was so disappointed when you were doing the file copy with the Mac and benchmarking, glad you called it out at the end of the video lol, it actually has to do with SMB protocol and Apple. AFP/NFS on a Mac for benchmarking is totally fine, cheers
I think macOS does not support smb3… only smb2
I also have troubles with users and passwords
Is there any complete guide to make samba or omv work 100% correctly with macOS?
@ 29:30 ZFS is cleaning up its write amplification mess (batch style after a big write, in this case 100Gbytes of data), so lots of reads, write overs and new writes for defrag going on, hence the sustained bigger power draw @ 22Watts, and more rapid aging of the media for which ZFS is so well known... ;/
Finally, Jeff's new PiNAS video. Can't wait to see his new PiNAS in action, doesn't look too hard to setup.
Hello, from my experience, the connector to the expansion board has a latch that is not locked correctly. It would be best if you locked it above the connector of the expansion to prevent the flat from disconnecting!
I don't even need to click on any links to know that it's already sold out
Surprisingly, the sata hat isn't sold out
More surprisingly, argon is accepting new order or raspberry pi 5 in my region
I've built a NAS with this hat and Rock Pi 4B (that was long before Raspberry Pi 4 and Rock 4B does have that nvme slot with a few pcie lanes) but with 4 3.5” HDDs. Wiring them with SATA extender cables was funny, as the Chieftec chassis I've used has separate SATA data and power connectors.
The 5V power supply on the hat is adequate: the datasheet for the step-down converter used on this hat specifies a maximum of 10A. So that's enough for the SBC and the drives (the 5V line is shared with SATA power).
Overall a very solid and well-designed product. Too bad ARM means being limited to OpenMediaVault. It does run solid on Armbian so no quarrel here.
Linus had a pretty good video using that Rockchip NVME board. I think I like this solution being able to use 2.5" SATA drives due to cost per TB. Might have to build one of these! Well that is if and wen the Radxa boards show back up in stock.
@JeffGeerling, thanks for your review. You convinced me to build my first NAS! I ended up designing the case enclosure and uploading it to Maker World! Thanks!!
Awesome! Glad you could do it!
I'm not in favour of Raspberry Pi tinkering for the purpose of NAS because,
I just found these ASRock N100 motherboards with built-in Intel processors. It's basically a whole mini PC on a single board, for like the same price as a decked-out Pi setup with a hard drive and all those extra hats.
Think about it: No more messing with software compatibility or overheating issues. This ASRock board is a simple, low-power option that comes with everything pre-installed like sata ports. Plus, it has regular PC connections like HDMI and multiple USB ports, so you can hook it right up to your monitor and peripherals just like the pi.
What about efficiency tho
@@gvasilakis about the same as whole raspberry pi setup.
My N100 board consumes 8/9 watts on idle.
@@vinsan98 The Pi on its own will idle at about 2W I think, so a massive difference in efficiency for an always-on device
@@cipnt I don’t think raspberry pi 5 with above configuration will consume 2 watts at idle.
In the video at 24:11 you can see it is consuming 8 watts idle.
Yes, the RPi gets a crap by all means. My 5 (five) years old Odroid HC4 board has got both native PCIe and SATA connectors right on board just for $70.
That setup was boarder line red shirt Jeff territory lol, guess that's what you get combining 4 different manufacturers into one DIY product. Excellent documentation as always!
boarder line?? wtf?
30:43 I had a bad feeling about using MacOS for file copy. But just using file managers in general for file copy (especially for network), I would try to avoid it and use raw commands as you don't exactly know what library/what it is using to perform the action.
24:58 didn''t watch everything yet, but before i forget, in OMV7 the software RAID management (mdadm) was moved to the plugin "openmediavault-md", or so i've heard.
OOOOH... so that explains why everyone's tutorial had it listed, but it's not in there by default? Seems a bit odd to take it out and not replace it with anything else for RAID, since that's my main use case for ever using OMV.
The ZFS plugin seems mature enough, they could install that by default IMO.
Also the documentation seemed to indicate that the drives needed to be wiped before RAID would work -- I'm not sure if that meant that the RAID option wouldn't even show up (I assume the plugin would need to be installed still though).
7:24 "as long as it works in the end, it's all good" quote of the year Jeff! 😆
The Ultimate UA-cam Channel
Jeff Geerling.
They should use longer stand offs, and include a heat sync for that hot chip. Also, if there's a case it should then be taller. Maybe even a litter taller than it needs to be to perhaps fit a 2.5GbE adapter?
Comparing an off the shelf NAS with the Pi NAS, obviously you are buying something that's going work out of the box, but that's missing the point. The challenge of building your own is where the fun is, assuming the and result is reasonably successful.
Jeff, I use OMV on a pi 4 with usb3 drives and get consistent full line speed gigabit writes from windows file transfer
Hey Jeff you keep accidently using nano instead of vi(m).
How stable is this setup since filming this video?
I have a 12yr old HP Microserver that’s happily been ticking away as a NAS but I’m looking for a reliable alternative to migrate to.
I've been running this setup since I made the video 24x7, and it's mostly just a backup target (ZFS replication) from my primary NAS, but it has not had an issue. I've only shut it down once to move it to my second rack a couple weeks ago (it was on my desk before that).
@@JeffGeerling thanks for the feedback, thats really helpful.
My use case is more of a final resting place for backups of pictures & videos.
I may try to set one of these up along with Plex to view the media on another PC/TV.
👍
what MacOS widget/app is that at 0:12 that shows the network speeds/activity?
Istat menu
I wonder if you would see any improvement, assuming it's possible, with bonding the 1G and 2.5G interfaces into a 10G switch? Also, you didn't mention anything about jumbo frames?
Jeff and Tom Stanton at open sauce.. well worth going. Except I can't nip over to the states so easy :(
Jeff, you are always very thorough & realistic. We thank you for that. Other channels, not so much. Sets you apart from others by a significant margin. Excellent video. Thx
You should pick up the Friendly Elec NAS kit with their new daughterboard. 4x NVMe 3.0 1x slots and 2.5 GBe networking, all for less than $150.
I have almost bought it a few times, but the total price of $180 or so including $40-50 shipping if I want it in less than a couple months keeps putting me off.
Oh, I’d be interested in seeing that!
Your lighting, video and audio quality are all 10/10 mate. Beautiful color grading too
RSJ with a 4” grinding wheel opportunity missed.
Wish there was a six bay version. I've got an old 6 bay NAS that I'd love to modify to run on a pi since the original hardware is getting too old. I think I could use extension cables to run from the hat to the back of the drive bays.
Ditto! I see a lot of potential in this form factor. Build up a case around it, and have a 2, 4, and 6-bay version, and I'd love to see that line be upgradeable with new Pi models over the years!
Aha ! You're the reason there was a pi shortage !
My immediate thought when you enabled the SMB sharing was "oh, so they have improved SMB speed with Macs". Nice you caught that and retested with windows.
I use sftp when pushing high volume data between Mac and Linux on the home network.
MacOS Finder copies on SMB to samba in Linux can easily saturate 10G networking, but it seems (my working theory) is the finder is polling the remote server for updates a lot. So you need some addl CPU to handle the extra requests. Which likely the PI is running very close to its limits cannot handle without some slowdowns. Plus samba is single threaded per connection, so those extra requests take time away from the copy.
But using a MacOS machine FOR benchmarking is real world if your intent is to use macOS as a client.
I gotta ask, what's the performance if everything is encrypted?
Should be the same. Samsung SSDs support encryption at the hardware level now
I presume this is pretty much meant for SSD NAS? Understood it supplies SATA and power, but the side of HDDs seems a bit large, and not sure if there's enough power.
Nobody:
Raspberry Pi: Look what I can do
🥰
6:20 - Isn't better to use a longer spacer screw instead? Guess it's even more ventilation for the cpu too.
3:54 what are you doing step Geerling?
Well, for me, this is a very professional presentation that I have seen here. All the details immediately inspire me to build the NAS. I will report how it worked for me. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to watch/listen to you.
I want one.
me two!
Me three!
Thanks Jeff. Exactly the project I am planning to build this year. Your tutorials and documentation are fantastic.
Moral of the story: don't use Mac or any apple products at all!
I've had nothing but issues with Mac's and networked storage. In pretty much all configurations and generations.
@DonovanGoodwin I had 0 issues with my network storage, I've a homemade NAS + VPN server + DHCP + DNS server all server running on a raspberry pi al all my windows, Linux pcs and Samsung phones, work always 100% everywhere Im in the the world, I'm always connected to my home network, 0 issues so far and is running 24/7 for last 5 years...
So, good luck with thise status apple things ahaahaha
@@primiSC exactly. In my personal life I use Android and Linux clients with my various NAS implementations. Thankfully never had any issues with those configurations. But with certain clients I found it impossible to provide their Apple products with NAS systems for backup and very unreliable solutions for mass file storage over the network. I'm glad I don't choose to deal with that at home😂
I wonder if this could stack with the Quad SATA hat. Technically the only thing restrictiong the stack order for the older HAT is the little USB 3.0 bridge they provide...
Mac lacking proper UI for moving files in 2024 is just killing me XD
I’m really liking the Aoostar R1 as a NAS since the N100 is a bit more powerful, built in 2.5G, and support for full size hard drives.
The only "Pi NAS" where people would be excited to say "omg it's so small".
I might be wrong, but it appears the wider end of the ribbon cable isn't locked on the pcb. The metal locking connector rail on the ribbon cable is supposed to lock onto the pcb connector after you plug it in.
Really interesting setup, if one doesn't mind taking on the pain of setting up an ARM based NAS solution, this is pretty much as good as it gets, and for cheap. I have been doing a lot of research in this area as well, made a few videos too and generally always interested in finding cute little storage setups with huge capacities. I had a quick question, do you know if this SATA hat can be used directly through an USB/TBT interface somehow or can it be plugged to other computing boards (x86 as well)? Specifically, I was interested in learning the pinout details of the board which I couldn't find on their website. It would be really helpful if you can give details on the hardware specs of this SATA hat board which can have numerous interesting applications. Thanks again for the video!
This is indeed a nice project. Great to see how far the PIs came. ZFS on one of these, wouldn't have thought that that's even an option.
However, for a DIY NAS I'd go with a used Server like a Fujitsu Primergy or similar for ~70€ and TrueNas. This will be better in every dimension except power consumption.
I've been considering putting a NAS together myself, and using a spare raspberry pi to do it. One of the major drawbacks I see is potential corruption of the SD card on power loss, then you're looking at either the additional cost of another drive to run it on, or a UPS to ensure consistent power delivery.
It seems the benefits of the pi in this use case outweighed by how cheap and performant budget prebuilt machines are now.
Pi is an excellent choice for other hobby applications, but it seems like the inferior option unless you're trying to achieve the highest possible power efficiency.
Any chance you'd try something similar on a Orange Pi Plus? :)
5:05 looks like a good time to attach any cooling apparatus you might choose to prevent smoke.
I have been watching your videos for a while and you just have the vibe of someone starting out UA-cam.
This could be a pretty interesting option for setting up that 2nd location backup, I wonder if setting it up with hdds is easy?
This is all crazy! I started with a Z-80 with 64k ram (actually had 128k that was bank switched) with a 256k TAPE drive, running CP/M!
Got the optional single side disk drive with 130k available space (rewrote bios eeprom and disk format so i could get 160 k out of a disk).
I was so jazzed when I got my first IBM clone 8086 with a whopping 27.5 Megabytes! of hard disk space! How would I ever fill THAT?
Now, with 11 pi4's and a pi 5, with a total of over 5 tbytes of storage, and you are talking petabyte arrays, blows my mind!
Subnote: at one point in my life, I worked in the National Semiconductor Corporation's international data center. They had "hard disk drives" that were the size of an apartment sized washing machines! The disc packs were hand swapped in the machines, to get data from archives to who ever needed it. Most of it was done at a blazing (at the time) at 2.4kb! Each disc pack held a whopping 80 megabytes!
Times, they are a changing!
Now, I'm thrilled to have