Raspberry Pi 4 NAS

I almost ran out of room on my old 1TB (2 x 1TB HDD in RAID 1) LG N2R1DD2 NAS. The Raspberry Pi 4 had just recently started shipping, so I thought I'd get one to build a replacement fileserver. Good timing. I had the thing finished and my files copied over from the old to the new, and a couple of weeks later the LG NAS started dying!! Not the drives, maybe the board. Since I cannot shell into it, I can't really see what's going on. Anyway, that LG box was a fine piece of kit. I don't think they make anything similar to it these days. That is a real shame because it did so much and it didn't break the bank when I bought it.

External Hard Drives connected to the Pi 4 on it's USB 3 ports. I have it set up as follows: The two 5TB drives are configured in RAID1 (mirrored). The whole RAID device is encrypted with LUKS (using a mighty long pass phrase). LVM is used to manage the (EXT4 formatted) space. It's not fancy, but I like the redundancy, whole drive encryption, and the flexibility LVM gives you. That being said, you could do all of that with ZFS alone! I don't even know if the Raspbian distribution offers ZFS, or if it does, how stable it is. I do like my data after all. (And yes, I do have a new external backup drive just in case it all collapses on me one stormy night.)

Anyway, Samba is up and running. It is handling network printing as well. I have the 4GB Pi 4, which is overkill for this NAS setup, but if I like I can fire up lightdm and play around with the Pi desktop for what it's worth.

My next experiment is going to be a super minimalist NAS using some spare drives (maybe even the old 1TB drives from the LG NAS) and a Pi Zero W. The external hard drive enclosures will run more than the computer! USB 2 speeds will be ugly. Still, it will be cool to see what kinds of cool things you can do with a $10 wireless computer!

Anyway, maybe I write a step-by-step how to one day, if anyone is even interested.

Experiencing ZFS In Ubuntu 19.10

ZFS in Ubuntu 19.10 has been an amazing introduction to this incredibly powerful file system for me. So far I've found it very easy to use. It's obvious that you can simply  and effectively replace LVM & software RAID in Linux with it. It looks like that is just the beginning. Looking forward to learning & doing much more with ZFS in the future.