PiNAS Setup

A cheap micro NAS using OpenMediaVault (OMV) and a Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB)

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Hardware

• LogiLink USB 3.0, 2-Bay Quickport/Dockingstation
• Raspberry Pi 4 2GB
• Toshiba P300 4TB
• USB Typ C Power Supply
• Akasa Pi-4
• Ethernet Cable CAT-5e (or better)
• Micro SD Card 32GB

Info and Learnings

1. A raid setup is not supported for USB devices by OMV. (Rsync jobs are a working alternative)
2. Without the Akasa case, the ethernet performance is limited. (Every cooler which includes the USB-Controller solves the issue)
3. HDD spin down should be set to keep the drives silent.
4. More than 2GB Ram is not needed.
5. A personal network storage can be very cheap if old drives are used.

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OMV Setup

In Short

Prepare the Raspberry Pi

1. Download Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) Lite

2. Put Pi OS on your SD Card (e.g. with balenaEtcher)

3. Enabling SSH by creating a empty file with name ssh on the SD Card

4. Start the Pi with your SD card an run the OMV install script:

   wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

5. Connect the hubs

6. Insert the drives

7. Reboot/boot your Pi

A Detailed Guid is on Github

https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/docs/blob/master/Adden-B-Installing_OMV5_on_an%20R-PI.pdf

Network Access to the Drives

• The common protocol to access your NAS is SMB/CIFS.
• To create a share with the SMB protocol, you need to link a Shared Folder
• A shared folder requires a File System
• And finally, the file system requires a Disk

Set up the:

1. Disks
2. File Systems
3. Shared Folders, and
4. SMB/CIFS shares

After that, the users and privileges of the shared folders must be set.

Backup and Redundancy

As RAID Management cannot be used with USB Hubs, Rsync must do the job of mirroring data between the drives.