Travelling doesn’t mean you have to leave all of your data — or your storage — at home if you know you’ll need it on the go. Lifehacker reader Ben sent in his DIY Raspberry Pi-powered NAS that’s small enough to connect multiple drives and go just about anywhere you’ll need all your files.
We’ve talked about using a Raspberry Pi as a NAS in the past, but the beauty of this method is that it’s small enough to go anywhere, packs 4TB of storage (or, really, 2TB of storage in two redundant drives), and uses a powered USB hub to add ports to the Pi. The whole thing set up to give Ben access to it whether he’s sitting right next to it or away from his base of operations, so to speak, while he’s travelling.
Ben uses his for two different purposes. For one, it’s great if he wants to take a lot of data with him on the go. Second, he also uses it to carry a lot of free space with him for projects or work while he’s travelling, so he doesn’t have to rely on someone else’s connection or storage solution.
Hit the link below for the full walkthrough, including all the code required to set up the Pi to act as a NAS.
Raspberry Pi NAS for Travellers [Benjamin Perove]
Comments
8 responses to “Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into A Travel-Friendly NAS”
Interesting concept,
honestly cant think of a valid use for it
such a shame you will be limited by a 100mb nic and USB 2.0 to make it worthwhile in a ‘travel’ environment where you would need to move things quickly
Car NAS
ahahah, touche’
Nothing says convenience like driving around with 4TB of media at your fingertips!
I used to have a set up the same but with 3x 2tb, using samba file share and transmission bit torrent. Speed was quite acceptable for media sharing but yes large files were quite slow.
You would be better off using a BeagleBone Black than a RPi. The ethernet port of the BBB isn’t connected to the USB bus like it is in the RPi so when you’re accessing the drives you’re not putting the data through the USB bus twice.
The BBB is also faster, but I’m not sure how much difference that would make.
Interesting idea to create a RAID with at least 3X the number points of failure not counting the connections which are somewhat vulnerable whilst travelling. A more practical and economical solution might be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchronization_software .
Raspberry pi, power supply, plus 2 hdd’s storage when travelling?
Looks like over kill
I purchased an inexpensive 1Tb usb 3 drive a few weeks ago for under $80 and you can get 2Tb for under $160. This would be faster and cheaper with less equipment.
If you need to set up a network when travelling however it my be useful.
For those who haven’t read the original article, one of the main aims here was to include drive mirroring so that loss of one drive would not destroy his data. Comparison with a single-drive NAS is missing the point.
If you use a USB 3.0 hub, the Pi is capable of drawing power from it. I used that setup for a while on a Pi-based home media player. (I suspect that only the model B Pi has USB 3.) That gets rid of one power supply.
Personally I would add a wifi receiver to the USB hub as well.
I love the way it’s just sitting there on the carpet. No anti-static precautions or anything like that..