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.