Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi for a DIY NAS ?

[Tech Junky]

60-70 MB/s

That's what you'll likely see through the pi then too. The limiter is the USB controller inside the shell or the port you connected to. If you shuck the drives from the shell and connect directly to sata they would run faster.

 

[sfx2000]

What do you think makes a better NAS, a Raspberry or an Orange Pi ?

For tinkering about - Raspberry Pi is still a good choice, however, supply chains are definitely a challenge in this post-pandemic situation we find ourselves in - Pi4 is pretty good, and CM4 with a trusted carrier board could be an option.

For other Chinese SBC's - I prefer FriendlyElec, aka FriendlyARM - I've met them personally, and they put out a good product compared to others in this space.

I have a lot of concern on Orange PI - Shenzen Xunlong has a rep for spitting out boards that are not fully baked, and trusting the community to sort things out as they move on to their next experiment, i'm not saying they are bad or good, it's just others are better perhaps...

For a base software platform - can't go wrong with Armbian on supported boards - I'll disclose up front that I do participate over there as a contributor, but it's a good team to work with, and they very much care for the community...

As I posted earlier - better to go with a known NAS vendor - QNAP, Synology, Asustor are all good - they do good product, support it if things go wrong...

DIY for NAS - it really comes down to risk tolerance - how much is your data worth?

 

[GHammer]

You know, someone asks a simple, straight forward question with two options.
He gets two pages of crap about used sff, why he should dump hundreds into a commercial NAS.
@sfx2000 gave clear lucid info on what was asked.

The rest is preening shirte.

 

[Clark Griswald]

Pi Case with Display
RPi Cooler
My Daughter built this with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB,. I repurposed for Pi-Hole and the temp rarely exceeds 105F.
Ditch the sd card and get an ssd and enclosure.

 

[Tech9]

Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and 64GB SanDisk card

SD card is the weak point in this setup.

DIY for NAS - it really comes down to risk tolerance - how much is your data worth?

Comes down to knowing what you are doing or not.

 

[Tech9]

He gets two pages of crap about used sff

What I offered as an option is not SFF, but Mini. It's 17.5 x 17.5 x 3.4 cm box and comes cheaper than RPi 4 kit for Intel i5-class x86 CPU.

 

[eightiescalling]

The Pi4s do tend to run hotter than earlier iterations. The fans tend to be pretty quiet though so I wouldn't worry about that. You can probably get away without one if you're only doing simple disk usage (no raid that uses parity blocks or similar for example) but I tend to default to a fan.

Completely agree with @Tech9 and @Clark Griswald . Ditch the SD card and replace with an SSD. Not only will it last (much much) longer but the SD card is a massive performance bottleneck as the cpu is constantly forced to i/o wait for pretty much everything.

To give you an idea of the performance difference, I have a small "cluster" of them with 3 net booting from the fourth and nfs mounts as their root volumes. All 4 run quicker than a single pi with an sd card.

 

[eightiescalling]

One of these - https://thepihut.com/products/ssd-to-usb-3-0-cable-for-raspberry-pi

Or an equivalent.

You just need to update the config to boot from USB.

 

[Tech9]

But, I see that the SD card has good speed too...

It's about reliability, not speed. You're building a NAS.

 

[Tech Junky]

SD card has good speed

Depends on a lot of factors. It might be rated for 1GB/s but, only pushes 10MB/s due to the I/O or controller on the system being used.

Being able to use a UHS-I/II means you need higher end reader on the host to get those speeds.

 

[eightiescalling]

That card might be rated for that read speed in ideal lab environment (large file, continuous read etc) but it won't be close for the small random writes that the OS puts on the card. That's what slows the Pi down as it waits for a small write to a log file or a couple of rows to update in a DB.

 

[GHammer]

What I offered as an option is not SFF, but Mini. It's 17.5 x 17.5 x 3.4 cm box and comes cheaper than RPi 4 kit for Intel i5-class x86 CPU.

Nonetheless, not at all what the OP asked for.

 

[GHammer]

What I offered as an option is not SFF, but Mini. It's 17.5 x 17.5 x 3.4 cm box and comes cheaper than RPi 4 kit for Intel i5-class x86 CPU.

I have been considering a G3 to use as a Proxmox host.

 

[Tech9]

They are very reliable. I have 3x in use for different tasks.

 

[Spud]

It seems that there are good chances to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and 64GB SanDisk card, from someone who no longer needs it.

Because I don't know at all how these Pi's work, I would like to ask you... How much do they heat up? Do they need a fan? Because I really wouldn't like to have a fan that buzzes all the time... Or, does this Pi turn on the fan only when needed? Would a passive cooling with just a radiator be enough for the NAS function? What power does it consume in idle?

I have an Argon 40 case for my Pi4. It has a metal body for passive cooling and a built-in fan. I've heard the fan come on only a couple of times, very briefly. In addition, it has a soft power button, which can be invaluable to avoid data loss if you're forced to reset.

The Argon range has a basic case, but also one with an M.2 NVMe base. And now they've even added a NAS case to the range, although it's fairly pricey:

Argon EON - NAS Enclosure for Raspberry Pi 4

The Argon EON case for the Raspberry Pi 4 (not included) allows you to build your very own 4-bay Raspberry Pi NAS!

thepihut.com

If you're looking to boot from a standard SSD drive, you have to be careful which USB connector to buy, as many are incompatible. See the table further down the page:

Raspberry Pi 4 Bootloader USB Mass Storage Boot Guide

Guide on how to set up the Pi 4 with native USB mass storage booting using the Pi’s firmware. No SD card is required for this method and it’s easy!

jamesachambers.com

The adaptor recommended by @eightiescalling works just fine. It's what I bought after my Sabrent enclosure refused to work.

 

[Spud]

From Argon I only like the NEO Case. I need something small. But the fact that it doesn't have any air vent makes me think. Even if the metal case is used as a radiator, won't hot air accumulate inside, which has nowhere to escape?

Where can a fan be connected to the Raspberry Pi 4 board? Is it temperature controlled? Is it completely off when the temperature is low?

I'm not familiar with the Neo, but it's one of the most recommended cases. Metal dissipates heat so quickly that the fan scarcely needs to come on. It's temperature controlled. With my Argon 40, the Pi fits into the case and onto the internal connectors, which takes care of the fan and power button.

 

[Clark Griswald]

Neo case does not have a fan. The case is designed to dissipate the heat.

 

[Spud]

I don't understand... NEO has a fan ? I don't see any fans in the pictures... They say it's a pasive cooling.

I can't find the case called "Argon40" on their website. Can you give me a link to the case you are referring to?

I may have misnamed it, sorry, but this is the case I own: https://thepihut.com/products/argon-one-raspberry-pi-4-case

 

[Cake]

I have several RasPi's including the 4, a Odroid C2 and a Banana Pi Pro. The Banana Pi Pro is what I use for last 6 years or longer I believe. I have some usb disk spinning hard drives plugged into a powered usb hub. The drives are encrypted and when there is a power outage I have to manually power on the powered usb hub, then restart the Banana Pi. The drives get mounted using some lines in rc.local and the password is fetched offsite via scp I believe. Well the raspi4 get a little hot for my taste and the C2 is now discontinued I believe as well as the banana pi pro. I think a orange or raspi would both work fine for you, there is a nifty program called webmin that uses a gui so you can easily manage your samba shares and other details.

DIY is definitely the way to go, even for routers!
I'm currently working on a chinese mini pc box to run zoneminder (home video surveillance).

edit: I should add, I read a article about a 200+ layer nand drive in the TBs might be available next year for a hundred bucks.

 

[eightiescalling]

I looked at his presentation page and it seems like a great idea. But I would like to ask you something... If it is configured on the web, it means that it works on port 80, right ? And then, if I want to host a website on it, how can I access it, as the http server also use port 80 ? Some time ago I tested OpenMediaVault, which is also configured on through web, and my http server stopped working. I had to uninstall it and configure my Samba manually...

From memory, webmin defaults to being setup on port 10000