NAS Posts
I've used a Raspberry Pi (several actually) for my NAS setup for more than a decade. It's been convenient and inexpensive. Unfortunately, I had another Pi die and they aren't as cheap as they used to be. Allow me preface: I don't recommend using a Raspberry Pi for a NAS, unless it's one of the Pi 5's with an Nvme hat. I also don't recommend using a laptop for a NAS, even though my newest setup is using a laptop.
Recently my Raspberry Pi 3, which was running my NAS, died. I knew it was coming, because it had lasted longer than any of my prior ones and it was getting very sluggish. My setup has been an external USB, formatted to XFS, as my primary storage. I replace this external drive about every other year and step up storage. My first one was about 512gb and we're now up to several TB. I had just upgraded the storage at the beginning of the year, so I don't want to make it obsolete right away, but I also want to begin moving toward internal storage. I will say I've never had an external drive die while being used for the NAS, but I have of course had retired drives eventually die. The retired drives go in a cabinet to be snapshot of my NAS if I ever need it.
I was already planning to build a new NAS setup when I bought the new USB drive. I was not planning for my Raspberry Pi to die yet, normally once I recognized it was dying I'd have several months to replace it, so I needed a temporary solution. I have an old Acer Nitro laptop that had been my gaming laptop and then passed down through my kids. It's in pretty rough shape, but it's still functional as a computer and a lot faster than a Pi. It was just sitting on a shelf, so I decided I may as well put it to use while it's still alive and I didn't have a working NAS. It has a Nvme slot, in addition to a 2.5" SSD. I decided to use the laptop, while I'm acquiring the things I want for the new NAS. I installed OpenMediaVault on it, setup my shares from the external USB, and everything is back running again.
OpenMediaVault is a media server, built on top of Debian server. It's headless, which means it's only a server and you administer it through a web browser over the network. It's great, I've used it on my Pi's and just makes everything easier. Running on this old laptop it uses basically no resources and there are some network performance gains as well. That's my temporary setup, which works great, but not the final solution I wanted.
Some tips for OpenMediaVault:
If your network isn't connected automatically, which mine wasn't, you can use the terminal command
omv-firstaidto connect to your network. It's also useful for initial configuration of other things.If you are using a laptop, you can disable the lid close issues in systemd.
Edit
/etc/systemd/logind.confReplace
#HandleLidSwitch=suspendwithHandleLidSwitch=ignoreBe sure to remove the
#at the beginning
If you are using an external drive, I recommend one that has it's own power supply and to format it to XFS
If you only have a single storage drive, which is also the OMV filesystem drive, you can install a plugin that allows you to create shares on the filesystem drive
