Hi, I’m Mark. Posted by 1 year ago. All content copyright Jeff Geerling. It seemed to work in both cases, though I did my actual benchmarks for the HDDs while they were connected through a 600W power supply (overkill, I know!). In reply to You only have one PCIe lane… by Markocloud. Then try to do another apt update and upgrade to see if your Pi can talk to the Raspbian repositories. First, let’s make sure the right stuff is installed: Since you already made sure the disks were working in Step 2, you can go ahead and create a RAID1 mirror. Introduction. Your email address will not be published. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a few alterations to the Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC one of which is the USB-C power connection which provides more power for the faster processor to … There's a stable build available for the Raspberry Pi 4… Do NOT use /mnt as the directory for your file share – always use a directory that resides on the device you’re mounting. It will ask for a password, and that password really, really should really be different than the password that’s used by the user to log into the Pi itself! Did you find any solution to what you suspect is linux flushing to disk and starving the nic of io bandwidth, continuously tanking the network transfer speed? No link for the RPI4? Designing a Raspberry Pi NAS using external USB drives. I covered that in the video here: https://youtu.be/oWev1THtA04?t=1096 — but basically it uses ~6W at idle (with drives on), and ~12W max under highest load writing files over the network. Mine’s low when coping files the it arround 6.5 Mb/s? The results weren't promising, and has me thinking of using my Intel NUC instead since it has several USB 3 ports. Also, for now I don't use a power switch (though later on I might wire one up), nor do I have any kind of indicators (yet). Once that’s done and you get no errors, safely remove the enclosures from your PC. For the first time, we've built a complete desktop experience. Copy the default file: sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf_OLD. Close. But putting slower hard drives into RAID can give better performance, so I next tested all four WD Green drives in RAID 0 and RAID 10: And, as you'd expect, RAID 0 basically pools all the drives' performance metrics together, to make for an array that finally competes with the tiny microSD card for 4K performance, while also besting the Kingston SSD for synchronous file copies. This makes for an ENORMOUS improvement in the performance of both USB: With numbers like that, I thought it would be worthwhile to try building a little RAID1/mirrored home NAS around a Pi 4. Even though Raspberry Pis older than the Pi 4 only have USB 2.0 ports, I wanted to check if they might support UASP, because as we'll see in a minute, just having UASP versus the older BOT protocol makes a large difference in performance, which would help even on older USB 2.0 ports. The default smb.conf file contains a number of examples, including one for a network share and one for a print share. I linked to those in my initial Pi Compute Module 4 Review post. So why do you think it matters if your drives are USB or SATA attached? Also, a NAS server will ensure that your data is totally safe, and no one else can access them except you. I was leaning toward a 2 port NAS since 3.5 in hard drives are available in 18tb and soon 20tb variants. But a 5 port compact SATA SSD NAS would also be interesting. So more RAM would definitely help make for more consistent transfers, but I don't think that's the only bottleneck, as copies would still start showing slowdowns after only 1-2 GB sometimes, even after a fresh reboot. The Debian-based Linux/Raspberry Pi distribution includes services like SSH, (S)FTP, RSync, and a BitTorrent client, which can be operated through a web interface, making it the perfect out-of-box solution for configuring a Raspberry Pi NAS. Your email address will not be published. Sorry for the delay replying. Raspberry Pi 4 Network Read/Write Tests. I’ve been wondering about using Pi for a Raid1 with 1 or 2 TB SSDs for storing high value data backups. In reply to How much ram does the… by oREDi. A Windows PC for certain configurations. …and the password will be whatever you set it to with smbpasswd. The first card I tested after completing my initial review was the IO Crest 4-port SATA card pictured with my homegrown Pi NAS setup below: But it's been a long time testing, as I wanted to get a feel for how the Raspberry Pi handled a variety of storage situations, including single hard drives and SSD and RAID arrays built with mdadm. While the GUI wont let you setup the drives, once they have been setup, they are manageable/viewable from within the GUI. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. As you can see, connected directly via SATA, the SSD can give noticeably better performance on all metrics, especially for small file random IO, which is important for many use cases. I bought this model because it is pretty average in terms of performance, but mostly because it was cheap to buy four of them! Samba is a re-implementation of the SMB (Server Message Block) networking protocol that allows Linux computers to seamlessly integrate into active directory environments. If you run cat /proc/mdstat and you see a _ (underscore) instead of a U, there’s a problem with a disk that requires your immediate attention. Mit dem neuen Raspberry Pi 4 B* lässt sich ein kleines NAS aufbauen, welches sehr sparsam ist und trotzdem über alle nennenswerten Funktionen verfügt. This part’s pretty easy too. If you open your file or network browser, it may automatically show up. I ran into a few different issues when formatting different sets of disks. To set a static IP, use your favourite editor to edit the /etc/dhcpcd.conf file. Amazing work! You probably get better efficiency if you use something like LVM and share a logical volume (rather than a file). Our little DNS-323 has been rock solid for the last decade but it’s getting long in the tooth and it’s just pokey enough to be annoying when I’m trying to do things on it. An open design, heat sinks and 2 cooling fans will keep the Raspberry Pi 4 from throttling. As for performance… this setup is much more responsive and can transfer files to and from the disks much faster than the old NAS. I found that I couldn’t get much more than what you’re seeing out of a regular 2.4GHz wireless connection. I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 2 NAS to the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 3B+ hoping to get the network performance boost promised by an excellent iperf benchmark. This is a pretty awesome article, man. But it's a good option if you just want to have external storage. Turn on the disks, wait for them to spin up, and boot up the Pi. You only have one PCIe lane to work with whether you have a regular rpi4 (the USB3 is attached to it) or you have an expansion card. I appreciate you a lot for doing this. In reply to Hi thank you for sharing… by Johan. I have seen the power supply 12V/2A you use for feeding 4 x Kingston SSD, but not the one for 4 x HDD. Building the fastest Raspberry Pi NAS, with SATA RAID, recompiling the kernel with SATA support on the Pi itself, Samba and NFS installation guides in this issue, CableCreation low-profile SATA cable 5-pack, CoolerGuys 12v 2A Molex power adapter (for drives), Cable Matters Molex to SATA power adapter, ICY DOCK ExpressCage 4-bay 2.5" hot-swap cage, Cross-compiling the Raspberry Pi OS Linux kernel on macOS, I'm booting my Raspberry Pi 4 from a USB SSD, You can use a PCIe switch and use both the SATA array. We have finally come to a point when disk speeds of over 100MB/s are mainstream for USB 3 Hard disks. I want to replace my old NAS with a low-energy but powerful replacement. 150Mbps isn’t too shabby at all! But the HDDs on the label had the same minimal power requirement, so I don't see why the 12V/2A supply wouldn't work for them. I had originally planned to use openmediavault to mirror the disks and create the network shares, but unfortunately it doesn’t support USB-connected disks. And the SATA kernel modules are not included by default, which means the first step in using a PCIe card like the IO Crest (which has a Marvell 9215 chip—which is supported in the kernel) is to compile (or cross-compile, in my case) the kernel with CONFIG_ATA and CONFIG_SATA_AHCI enabled. I'm looking for a new project and this is looking good. Technically it's not required to partition before creating the array... but there are a couple small reasons it seems safer that way. Would like to disagree with you about OpenMediaVault not supporting USB disks. Again, this is how I set up my own little two-disk mirror. Thoughts on which you’d prefer? It’s time to restart Samba so it loads the new configuration: If you don’t get any messages or errors, things may actually be working! Install the hard drives in the enclosures, connect them to your PC, and using the software of your choice, remove any existing partitions on the disks and create a single NTFS partition (or ext4 if your PC is a Linux machine) that uses the entire capacity of the disk. The limiting factor in the performance for a NAS on RPI is always going to be the 1GB Ethernet port. Now reboot your Pi, and once it comes back up, use cat/proc/mdstat and blkid to see if everything’s okay: Now that the disks are mirrored, it’s time to put a filesystem on them. Connected through USB 3.0, a SATA SSD is no slouch, but if you want the best possible performance on the Pi, using direct NVMe or SATA SSD storage is the best option. But I decided to go all out (well, at least within a < $100 budget) and buy three more Kingston SSDs to test them in the same RAID configurations: And it was a little surprising—since the Raspberry Pi's PCI Express 1x 2.0 lane only offers around 5 Gbps theoretical bandwidth, the maximum real-world throughput you could get no matter how many SSDs you add is around 330 MB/sec. Congratulations! I just stuck to the pi user because I wanted to keep things simple to start. It’s an intermediate tutorial (not for noobs) and shows you how to create a Linux RAID array which is a good skill to have. If for some reason /dev/md0 doesn’t mount properly, you may end up writing data to and filling up the SD card instead of using the disks! Depending on the kind and size of disks you have and the type of enclosure, creating the mirror and syncing it up may take up to a day. So there are other IO pressures that the Pi reaches that make RAID for SATA SSDs less of a performance option than for spinning hard drives. I did copies to and from a Windows PC that has an SSD, and monitored the speed using nload on the Pi and Performance Monitor on the PC. Wir zeigen euch wie man so ein NAS aufbauen kann und wie sich der Raspberry Pi 4 B* im Vergleich zu seinem erst einem Jahr alten Vorgänger, dem Raspberry Pi 3 B+*, schlägt. After a bit of consideration, I decided to see if I could build one with a Raspberry Pi. On the surface, the networking functionality is unchanged: there’s still 802.11ac Wi-Fi, though an upgrade to Bluetooth 5.0, plus a wired gigabit Ethernet port. To test your smb.conf file, run the following: The “Loaded services file OK” is a good sign that your smb.conf file has no obvious errors in it. You should be able to use it on Raspberry Pi 3, 3 B+ and other variants as well but please check the official project websites for the exact details. Unfortunately, after the upgrade, I discovered that iperf benchmark had very little to do with the actual practical performance. Besides this GitHub issue, I documented everything I learned in the video embedded below: The rest of this blog post will go through some of the details for setup, but I don't have the space in this post to compile all my learnings here—check out the linked issue and video for that! I'm pretty sure this is also what I'm running into with my laptop usb drive raidz nas that's limited by the 1x pcie lanes to the pch. Using Linux's Multiple Device admin tool (mdadm), we can put these drives together in any common RAID arrangement. This one is the 4GB version, and running free -h during the benchmarking shows the Pi is filling up its RAM with filesystem cache data. Now that the RAIDset is built, you need to save its configuration so your Pi knows what to do with it when it boots: sudo -imdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.confexit. To make sure mdadm automatically configures the RAID array on boot, persist the configuration into the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file: And to make sure the filesystem is mounted at boot, add the following line to the bottom of your /etc/fstab file: One other thing I had to do a number of times during my testing was delete and re-create the array, which is not too difficult: Then also make sure to remove any entries added to your /etc/fstab or /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf files, since those would cause failures during startup! The Raspberry Pi 4 is a big improvement over the RPI 3 on many fronts. Hi thank you for sharing this valuable information. Could I send you some to try? The improved performance also makes the Raspberry Pi 4 the perfect candidate for a media centre, NAS, server, gaming emulator and many other resource-intensive applications. Really interesting article. To make a Raspberry Pi NAS Box, you have to prepare these parts: Raspberry Pi 4 （the best choice). The BCM2711B0 in the Raspberry Pi 4 has four CPU cores and has a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, which at first blush doesn’t seem much quicker than the quad-core, 1.4-GHz BCM2837B0 in the Raspberry Pi 3B+. These tests will compare the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B+ to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ CPU performance The LINPACK test simply solves linear equations and is a good enough test for raw CPU performance. Storage, which as we have said can be USB disks, pen drives, etc. They may have the CPU horsepower, but with the on-board Ethernet and USB sharing the same USB2 port, their performance is reportedly not all that great. In reply to No link for the RPI4? Enhances the performance and efficiency of the system as well. Go back, check all of the parts and connections, and try again. Samba is a mature, stable, and very useful batch of software that makes it pretty easy to create simple network shares. Or it… by Jason Harrison. I’m an engineering technologist by trade but a tinkerer at heart. If not, go back over the file and make sure the changes you made were saved. So, follow this article step by step to turn your Raspberry Pi into a NAS Server. to all the different products I used to build my SATA RAID array: Wow. You can setup the drives with a little bit of command line work that I have documented on my YouTube channel. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I admit that when I was tinkering with OMV, I didn’t go any further after the GUI gave an error when I tried to point it to USB-attached disks. For the first solution, we will be using a software called Samba to build a NAS with Raspberry Pi. Before we edit the file, though, we need to create the directory that Samba will use to share over the network: sudo mkdir /mnt/NAS_FILEsudo chown pi /mnt/NAS_FILEsudo chgrp users /mnt/NAS_FILE. Have you been able to test different SATA chipsets? TechBytes with Ron Nutter. For my board, I’m currently eying the JMB582 or JMB585 which are pci to 2 or 5 port SATA chips, respectively. Discussion. I just did some performance testing by uploading a 20GB file to the samba share. Thank you for sharing your benchmark and all the steps. Each U represents an active and healthy RAID disk. So the “Share definitions” section in my smb.conf file looks like this: Notice how the “valid users” section has the name “pi” in it – you can change that to anyone you’d like (or have more than one user on that line), but for each user on that line, you’ll need to create an account on the Pi for them. Open your file or network browser and browse to the static IP address you set way back in Part 4.