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| title | description | tags | date | cover | draft | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creating an open source NAS | My process for building an open source NAS with a powerful single board computer and a couple of large HDDs |
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2020-03-09 23:43 -0400 | /assets/posts/disk.png | true |
A few months ago, I decided that I needed a NAS. I didn't want anything proprietary because this was going to store all of my data, my mother's, possibly some friends', as well as backups for all of my servers; I needed to know I had full control over every aspect of the system to ensure it was secure. To that end, I decided to build it with an SBC1 from Pine64.
Parts
- ROCKPro64 - $79.99
- NAS Case - $44.99
- SATA -> PCIe adapter & RAID controller - $47.99
- 6 TB WD Red Pro - $203.99
- Heatsink w/ fan - $5.29
- Fan for the case - $3.99
- Power supply: US or EU - $12.99
- 16 GB eMMC Module - $15.95
- Any microSD card
Total: $415.18
To reduce the overall cost, you could go with a cheaper HDD; I got this one because I need reliability in the very long run but a more inexpensive disk is perfectly suitable. Without accounting for the drive, the NAS is ~$215 and very reasonably priced compared to most other options.
Assembly
Refer to Pine64's wiki on assembling the case. I don't know if it was intentional or what but, for the HDDs, I was only given enough screws for one. For the cover, I still have three empty screw holes. It's not a huge deal but it would have been nice to have enough screws for everything.
Software
I chose to go with OpenMediaVault. However, I didn't use Pine64's image; there were a variety of errors when basic operations were run so I decided to use vanilla armbian. Thankfully, they have an image for the ROCKPro64 and it worked flawlessly. The next step was getting OMV set up on it but, like a boss, they provide a script for that 😉
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/master/install
chmod +x install
sudo ./install
Additional setup info can be found in an armbian guide they've created.
Drivers
This posed a huge problem for me. Neither the "official" ROCKPro64 OMV image nor armbian included the driver for my RAID controller so I had to figure that out.
Huge shoutout to fromport in the #openmediavault channel on Freenode; they
were a massive help with getting the driver situation sorted out.
Check out Secluded.Site, my personal webpage; I'll be using it for posts like this in the future and will try to leave this space for official announcements (like when backups have been automated using this very NAS 😉).
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Single Board Computer ↩︎