In my little journey to planning out a better backup plan for files on my network, as well as cloud based storage, I laid out a plan to build out a few NAS systems for primary use, backup, and a remote copy offline.
Cheap NAS
I was deciding between hooking up an external USB hard drive, or setting up a separate NAS device where I can insert a hard drive. A NAS gives me a few more options as I can swap out the hard drive as larger drives come out, and I can push data to it over SMB, FTP, or other protocols that let me access the device over large distances. In addition, I believe that most NAS devices can email reports on SMART statistics regarding the drives health. An external USB hard drive is fairly limited in what it’s capable of doing, only offering transfer over USB – even if it’s within an enclosure where the drive can be replaced.
So in general, can I find a diskless NAS that supports a 20 TB SATA HDD with 10 GB network, and file encryption?
I’m not limited to one bay, but the general idea is that I only need one drive. If the most value for the money is 2 or 4 bays, then by all means, I’ll setup the multiple drives as one large drive to double the total capacity. This in turn will determine the future size of my primary NAS as I want everything to be capable of being backed up to the drive(s) in cold storage.
The down side is that I will not be able to setup my own operating system to control what features are available. This is a no-frills storage solution. The main features I am looking for are FTP, SMB, encryption, 10 GBps+ Network, SATA, high read/write performance, and replaceable drive.
What’s available?
| Brand | Size | File System | Encryption | CPU | RAM | Gbps | Bays | Max Single TB | $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orico | 2.5 | 4 core CD2510 | 0.08 Gigabit interface? | 1 | $80 | ||||
| Yottamaster | 2.5 | 1 | 1 | 8 | $89 | ||||
| Buffalo | |||||||||
This is a NAS Chassis | 4 | $150 JBOD? | |||||||
| Synology DS124 | 2.5 3.5 | Btrfs, ext4 | Maybe? | 4 x 1.7 GHz | 1 GB DDR4 non-ECC | 1 | 1 | 108 tested: 20 | $143 |
| Synology DS223j | 2.5 3.5 | Btrfs | 4 x 1.7 GHz | 1 GB DDR4 non-ECC | 1 | 2 | tested: 20 | $189 | |
| Synology DS223 | 2.5 3.5 | Btrfs, ext4 | 4 x 1.7 GHz | 2 GB DDR4 non-ECC | 1 | 2 | 108 | $250 | |
| Ugreen DXP2800 | Yes | 4 core 4 thread Intel 12th gen N100 | 8 GB DDR5 Expandable 16GB | 2.5 | 2 HDD 2 M.2 | HDD: 24 M.2: 4 | $399 | ||
| Synology DS423 | 2.5 3.5 | Btrfs, ext4 | 4 x 1.7 GHz | 2 GB DDR4 non-ECC | 1 | 4 | 108 | $369 | |
| UnionSine HD3510 | 18 | $252 | |||||||
| OWC Mercury Elite Pro | 3.5 | HFS+ (Mac) | n/a | n/a | USB 0.252 | n/a | 20 | $499 | |
| WD WDBBGB0220HBK-NESN | n/a | n/a | USB 0.125 to 0.625 | n/a | 22 | $499 | |||
| MAIWO Dual Bay Hard Drive Enclosure | 3.5 | n/a | n/a | USB ? | 2 | 18 | $54 |
I can’t find a networked HDD where you can replace the internal HDD. I can hardly find anything regarding hard drive encryption on most products. By time I run into network ports higher than 1 GB, I’m already running into the $300 range. Upon further thought, a single drive is only capable of reading at about 80 to 160 MB/s. You’d need to read from 10 drives simutaneously before it becomes viable to have something faster than a Gigabit connection on the network. Although USB may be capable of speeds at 5 Gb/s, the HDD itself brings up the speed limitation. Sure – caching could read ahead and prepare to serve files a bit faster from the disks RAM, but you are limited in how much can be stored.
So now I’m reconsidering my options. The Synology 1 Bay storage seems more ideal at $143, but I can’t find anything regarding the file system supporting encryption. Adding a second bay for $25 seems like the optimal solution.
Buying a 20 TB HDD without any enclosures starts around $200. A 10 TB HDD (renewed) starts out at about $75. A cheap 20 TB NAS with disks is roughly $339 each (I want to swap them regularly while one is offline, safely tucked away) – but mind you, this is eventually the cold storage NAS where the disks are not running 24/7 and not configured for data redundancy. The primary NAS is going to be a custom system with more drives, plenty of redundancy, and power to run additional services such as virtual PC’s, docker containers, and heavy bandwidth to access the files, watch movies, run Artificial Intelligence models, interact with services, etc.
So the question is – is $330 worth it? Or – is $660 worth it for two pairs?
So, I’m always thinking about the Raspberry Pi. Is the Raspberry Pi capable of being a NAS that can run at similar speeds for file transfer? It’s got a Gigabit port and 8 GB RAM. There is a SATA hat that people use. That may make it possible to run four SATA drives at 6TB each (about $55 each), but I’ll need an external power source supplying 12 volts for the drives. I’d also need an enclosure that the Pi, drives, and power supply could sit inside.
The kits seem limited to 2.5″ drives – which are usually SSD, but something doesn’t seem to match with the USB ports when looking at both the Penta SATA hat and Pi. The spacing on the hat looks like it could serve as a backplane for 2.5″ drives as well, but I could probably get some SATA extensions to accommodate for 3.5″ drives. The EON case includes SATA board for Raspberry Pi 5 with support for 2 x 3.5″ drives, and 2 x 2.5″ drives, fan for cooling, and adds space for you to include a battery. When looking at the Geekworm shield, I see all five SATA connectors available, and it comes with a power splitter cable for all five drives.
The Pi and the hat are about $160. By comparison, the 2 port Synology NAS that I was considering is $149. For $11 more, I can use smaller hard drives to achieve the same capacity over five drives at 4TB each rather than two 10 TB drives, while potentially increasing read/write speed as it could write to all the drives instead of just two. I haven’t figured anything in costs regarding active cooling, 12v power supply, 5v power supply, the microSD card, or the case. Actually, the SATA hat can supply 5v power to the Pi from its own 12v power supply via the barrel jack or molex cable. For 3.5″ drives, I’d have to design a case that could be 3D printed or cut with a laser cutter, bringing down costs by using materials that I already have on hand. I’m itching to use the Glowforge at my libraries new Makerspace, and that would be a perfect project to customize.
But – can the Raspberry Pi really deliver that extra speed? The PCIe 3.0 interface on the Raspberry Pi can handle up to 3.5 GB/s, so it’s more than capable. I’ve seen examples with the Pi delivering 110 MB/s over the gigabit adapter, but using a 2.5 GB/s port via USB 3 adapter ($20), it was able to deliver up to 256 MB/s solid state storage. At idle, it runs around 9 watts, and 12 watts at load (See I Build A 4-Bay NAS Using A Raspberry Pi 5 and The ULTIMATE Raspberry Pi 5 NAS) . Using spinning rust, it may not deliver as fast, or may need more power to run. Flash storage can be accessed randomly.
The major enticement is control over the OS and customizing the case with my own design and the ease of swapping the Raspberry Pi board if needed. From reading forum posts, TrueNAS takes about an hour to boot on the Raspberry Pi – so that’s definitely out of the question. Open Media Vault can be installed on the Pi to manage the drives, which supports ZFS. If I don’t want to bother with web interfaces, I can just do everything via the command line after installing samba.
Here is the other side of the argument against a Pi solution. It’s going to look junky or unprofessional. Buying a product on Amazon, I know it’s going to work as soon as it arrives. However, I’m still confused if the products on Amazon support drive encryption. With Raspberry Pi – Linux operating systems usually support encryption via DM-Crypt. Also, a junky setup is less likely to be stolen if the thief sees something else that’s easier for them to sell. If they just see the hard drives and pull them out, then I don’t need to worry as much about the private key on the OS, as its more than likely that they’ll just reformat the drives before selling them. Maybe I can write on the drives in permanent marker: “This disk stolen from Lewis Moten”. The thief would have to consider the extra time they would need to spend cleaning that off before selling it. The best outcome when stolen, is that the thief would try to use the drives for themselves and reformat for use with Windows.
The Semi-Cheap NAS
So – it looks like using the Raspberry Pi is the best value for a NAS, given that I know how to work with it. I can hook up 5 3.5″ hard drives, a 2.5 Gb/s adapter, and encrypt the operating system while getting transfer speeds up to 250 MB/s. The drawback is the time its going to take to create a customized case to support all five 3.5″ hard drives. Let’s price out all the parts that I think that I’ll need.
| Part | x | $ |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5, 8 GB RAM | x | $80 |
| Shipping – Pi 5 (Arrives Nov 8 – 11) | x | $4.81 |
| Sales Tax – Pi 5 | x | $4.24 |
| Geekworm X1009 PCE to 5-Port SATA Shield | x | $60 |
| 5-Bay Mobile Rack Backplane Hot Swap Cage | $60 | |
| 5x SATA Connectors, 8 inch | $10 | |
| 5 3.5″ SATA HDD, xTB | see below | |
| Heat Sink (SATA Controller) – 100 pcs, only need one | $10 $0.10 | |
| Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler | x | $5 |
| 60W 12V 5A Power Supply | $10 | |
| Shipping – X1009 & Active Cooler (Arrives Nov 11 – 18) | x | $3.50 |
| USB 3.0 To 2.5 Gbps Ethernet | $22 | |
| Micro SD card – 128GB U3 SDXC | $9 | |
| $269 |
Let’s go ahead and see what prices are for SATA hard drives. I’m looking specifically at renewed drives from data centers, and avoiding the SAN or SAS drives. I know I go on, and on about redundancy and failed drives, etc. However, this is the cold storage NAS and needs to be cheaply built. These drives often have a 3-5 year warranty. If I can get large drives, then the 5 array setup could still be setup with the ability to still recover with one or two failed drives. Also, if the drives are from different batches, or had different hours being in use in the datacenter, or a variety in being spun up/down, there is less chance that multiple drives will fail at the same time. Plus – if I can get experience successfully recovering from a failure, I’ll feel like I’ve overcome an issue that’s been a thorn in my side for years.
20 TB Drives
18 TB Drives
16 TB Drives
14 TB Drives
12 TB Drives
10 TB Drives
8 TB Drives
6 TB Drives
I feel as if I’ve learned quite a bit about the various hard drive brands. I put all of the data into a spreadsheet and then graphed averages. For the 10 and 12 TB drives, I removed Seagate and Water Panther because the prices were very high compared to other brands. What I ended up seeing was a sweet spot of cost per terabyte at its lowest between 10 to 14 TB hovering just below $8.
| TB | Average $ | $/TB | 5 Drives |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | $244 | $12.24 | $1,223 |
| 18 | $192 | $10.68 | $961 |
| 16 | $168 | $10.47 | $838 |
| 14 | $108 | $7.76 | $543 |
| 12 | $95 | $7.93 | $476 |
| 10 | $79 | $7.88 | $394 |
| 8 | $86 | $10.79 | $432 |
| 6 | $62 | $10.26 | $308 |
So the total costs for five renewed hard drives ranges around $400 to $550 for 10 to 14 TB volumes. Lets say we go with the 14 TB drives. The total cost of this system appears to be around $819. ($269 parts + $550 drives). Let’s take a look at those specs.
- 2.5 Gbps Ethernet Port
- 5 x 14 TB Sata Drives (70 TB Capacity)
- Five hot swappable bays
- 8 GB RAM
- 2.4 GHz quad core ARM processor
- 800 MHz VideoCore VII GPU
- 9W Idle, 12W Load, 60W Max
- Control over OS
So – with all of that, can I find a comparable NAS around $800? With discs?
- Near parts budget ($269)
- Terramaster F4-212 4 Bay NAS – QuadCore 1.7GHz CPU, 1GB DDR4 RAM, 1 GbE + 2.5 GbE adapter, Diskless $219
- Near total budget ($819)
Most competitors end up being USB 3.0 drives, or direct attached storage (DAS). I did give thought to just connecting a Pi to the USB drives to expose them to the web, but internally, the USB interface has too much control over the file system and encryption goes out the window.
As we find diskless NAS close to our configuration and near our specked price, we have only four drives and a fraction of ram. If we jump up to the overall cost of our system, then we start to see the higher speeds for the network, and M.2 slots for cache drives. We still need to add that $500 back for the drives. The budget build of $270 in parts is hard to find similar offers.
If I want to go the extra mile, I could get a NAS chassis that’s meant for a Mini-ITX or Micro ATX motherboard to make it look nice for now and tuck the Pi inside. I could put a motherboard and PSU inside at a later time with a proper graphics card, allowing me to change the architecture of the CPU to x86, use TrueNAS core as the OS, and reclaim the Pi 5 for other projects.
On top of all of this, I suspect that with the PCIe 3.0 bus on the Raspberry Pi, I could get a PCIe splitter and hook up a second SATA card to add another pool of five drives – which makes cases with 10 bays look very attractive in terms of expansion. In reality – this little system is powerful enough that it could become the remote NAS off-site. I would prefer to have SSD drives dedicated for cache and a secondary log, but with a server that only talks to the primary NAS for backup, that may be helpful, but not critical for its role. Well… maybe. If transfers are greater than 4GB, the RAM will be occupied while waiting for data to be written to the hard drives.
GeekPi FPC PCIe HAT for Raspberry Pi 5
Dual B12 Hat: $25
Quad B14 HAT: $40
The question is – will this work with M.2 NVMe SSD drives? Will they operate at slower speeds if the PCIe is downgraded to split between multiple PCIe devices? Either way, I could still use SATA flash drives for the cache and log drives in ZFS.
Cases
I had found the cases meant to accommodate the Raspberry Pi with 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives earlier. Let’s take a look at the various cases that I found that we could also consider, ranging from NAS server cases with hot swap capability down to cases you can print out on a 3D printer. Some of the cases, particularly for JBOD’s (Just a Bunch of Disks), require a bit of creative thought in how to attach the Pi. Some of the DIY plans could probably be modified to increase the drive bays, and most were found through yeggi.
After looking through various crafts on yeggi, I have a desire to make a NAS case look like the ghost trap in Ghost Busters. I’m uncertain that five drives and the Pi can fit within the dimensions though. It looks like I could buy one as a costume prop and turn it into a case.
Ghostbusters Ghost Trap Official Ghost Busters Afterlife Accessory
14 inch plastic costume prop for kids
It looks like the trap doors don’t open, and much of the details are lost. Another idea would be to use a Hell Raiser puzzle box or a Rubik’s cube, but the cubes would need to be scaled up in size. I’m also a big fan of R2-D2, but I would have to scale him down to size. Also, R2-D2 is round, and not ideal for optimizing space.
I think I’m getting a bit carried away there. The cases that look ideal are:
- JONSBO N1 Mini-ITX NAS Chassis (small, nice to look at)
- SilverStone Technology 5 Bay Hot-Swappable NAS Chassis SST-CS351B (Hot swappable)
- 8 + 2 Bay DIY NAS Case Hot Swap Backplane (Host swappable, Room for more drives)
So I’m looking at a case between $140 and $190, making it possible to upgrade the Pi to an ITX motherboard of some kind, and potentially adding more drives with one of the cases. It feels odd that the case is pretty much the most expensive part in the whole system. However, if this becomes the remote server and ends up at someones home, I’d prefer that it doesn’t look like an eye sore. The Jonsbo case is practically inconspicuous, where as the other cases that I picked out look professional, in that they clearly communicate to everyone that they are servers, and were put together professionally.
I started out on this article with a goal of making purchasing a 20 TB drive that had a 10 Gb/s ethernet port. Not only are these drives fairly expensive, they are slow for just one disk that couldn’t come close to saturating 1 Gb/s. Furthermore, any drives with ethernet ports seemed to be non-upgradable. I looked at USB drives as well, but ran into problems with actual speed and encryption. I expanded to looking at various NAS diskless solutions, but started running into high prices. I was on the cusp of settling on one or two when I considered using a Raspberry Pi, and worked out the parts necessary to setup a system with five disks, and potentially 10 in all.
