Saturday, August 13, 2016

Project: Raspberry Pi Based Network Attached Storage



Objectives

My goal in this project was to establish low power, low maintenance, and low cost redundant storage. I was willing to compromise on speed in order to keep costs low. 

Components

I used a pair of 1-terabyte external hard drives connected by USB with external power. These were connected to a Raspberry Pi B+.

Software

I used Rasbian Linux on the Raspberry Pi with mdadm for RAID.

Security

For external access I have SSH access forwarded to the NAS. However, access is by SSH key only

Results

Performance 

Performance is pretty poor - I get about 3.5 MB/second when reading and writing data. Large file transfers take quite a while (12+ hours).

Cost

The whole setup cost about $165:

Power Consumption

Under load this setup uses about 12 watts. Not bad! That's about 105 kilowatt hours per year, or about $7 per year. 

Conclusion

This project met my objectives for low cost, high availability, redundant storage. It's slow, but it works just fine for seldom-accessed photos and videos and hosting git repositories.



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