I’ve been meaning to play around with setting up NAS (Network Attached Storage) device for a while now, and I’ve got a lot of old Raspberry Pi computers around so… I got openmediavault running on a Raspberry Pi and connected an old USB hard drive to it. It worked pretty well! I was mostly testing things and didn’t really have this plan to move all of my files to it, which is good because I killed it. I mean, it died. The hard drive, not the Pi.
I had to connect the drive to the Pi using a USB hub so the drive would get enough power. I honestly grabbed some old random hard drive enclosure not realizing at the time the drive inside was at least a decade old. A friend of mine gave me a pile of drives a few years back that were retired from a recording studio. Anyway, the drive died, I got some good lessons in drive repair on Linux, and I moved on.
While the Raspberry Pi seemed to do quite well running openmediavault I also had an old Dell OptiPlex lying around so I decided to use a “real” computer so I could explore things like running containers and more heavy load stuff on the NAS.
Overall I’ve been mostly pleased with things. It’s been quite an improvement since I last ran a NAS on an NSLU2 long, long, ago.
Right now I’ve got a recent SSD drive that is not total garbage as the primary drive, and another old “junk” drive as a backup drive. I used the openmediavault rsync tasks feature to setup a nightly backup to the junk drive. I am sure that junk drive will die at some point but I’ve got a lead on some larger replacement drives from a friend. (Also on the cheap, because that’s obviously how I roll things.)
I’ve got a friend who is a huge fan of Synology and I do admit their stuff is really nice, especially the management interface. If I had unlimited funds I’d probably run out and buy a Synology device (or two) and call it a day… But then again there is a certain appeal to rolling your own solution and learning a lot in the process.