Building the best Raspberry Pi NAS - Wiretrustee SATA

earlier this year i built a nas with a raspberry pi that had 2.5 gig networking and i compared it to an asa store nas at the same time somebody emailed me about this wire trustee sata board that they were building one of the complaints i had about my custom nas was the fact that it was kind of hodgepodge and it took up a ton of space it didn't perform as well as the intel based one that i used from asus store but it performed pretty well and i i said in that video that a one gigabit nas was probably the ideal for a raspberry pi and so today i have the wire trusty sata board which has four sata slots in it for any kind of sata drive you can use 2.5 or 3.5 inch drives and i'll get into that in a bit this board is really awesome and it's basically the exact thing that i wanted to build originally when i built my satin ass this is one of a couple different nas solutions for the pie this one is all in one board i'll get into the details here and show you some of the interesting parts of it of course right in the middle you have those four sata slots and each slot carries power and data so that you don't have to have a separate power supply for this board it gets everything through a 12 volt barrel connector or the 12 volt fan pin just like on the raspberry pi cm i o board it also has some of the standard ports like hdmi 2.0 so that you can have a display output it has two usb 2.0 ports although these ports are disabled by default because of the way the pios is set up so you have to enable that in your config file and it has an ethernet gigabit port that's right off the compute module four's network nic the board also has a serial header for debugging it has a real time clock built in it has a fan connector with a pulse width modulation chip so you can control pwm fans it has a reset button and it has a micro sd card slot so that you can run either the compute module light like this without any mmc or a compute module with mmc and on the underside it has all the power circuitry and it has a chip here that's the sata controller that's directly off the pci express bus on the raspberry pi and this chip means that you're going to get the full speed that you can get through the raspberry pi's by one pci express gen 2 bus and it's really compact i think it's a 100 millimeter square and it has four mounting screws and they actually make this custom heat sink plate for it as well so we're going to assemble this all together and see how it works so they sent me this whole kit which includes a case and they have two different cases they have a case for 3.5 inch hard drives and they have a separate case for 2.5 inch hard drives if you have 2.5 inch sata ssds you can actually plug them directly into the board like this and you can plug foreign and this board is actually in my opinion best in this case because it takes up less volume you just have a little cube that's the size and these these drives tend to use less power too so this board if you have big bulky hard drives for nasa's and things sometimes they use a lot of power and that can cause issues if you have all four drives and i think that this board revision actually has a bug where if you have four high-powered drives try to power up at the same time it can actually reset the board newer board versions should have the ability to power up drives one by one instead of all four at the same time but like i said that's not a problem with these smaller drives at least most of these smaller drives you can get uh 2.5 inch ssds or even 2.5 inch hard drives in many different capacities up to 8 or 10 or 12 terabytes so for for many people this kind of board with these kind of drives would be the ideal situation i actually asked for the 3.5 inch case so that i could test it with some hard drives because i think a lot of people that want to have a huge amount of mass storage on a gigabit network might be interested in this solution and i'm going to put that all together so the first step is taking your raspberry pi compute module and putting it on the back side of this board so you always want to make sure that these hundred pin connectors are lined up correctly in the correct orientation and it's kind of hard to miss on this board because the way that it's outlined where you put the pie itself once that's in there's actually a couple of pads that you can put on thermal pads so that you can have the heat transfer off of the raspberry pi system on a chip and off of the sata controller into this giant heat sink which will keep the pie cool and orientation matters on this board because you want this little pad that pops out on the heatsink to touch the sata controller so i'm going to put this on there and apply a little bit of pressure and then we'll screw down the four screws that hold it all together all right so i have the the actual board mounted onto the heatsink and if you look on the side you can't really see it that well but if you look through the side you can see that the heat pads are actually making good contact so that's going to be helpful for cooling even without a fan this massive heatsink should keep things cool enough that there should never be an issue on this board it also includes a fan in the kit and this fan is going to keep the drives themselves cool this fan is not really for the pie it's for the drives the pie is going to stay cool through this massive heat sink on the bottom next up i'm going to put together the case itself and it looks like this is this is not a hot swap design for the 3.5 inch drives for the 2.5 it's a little easier because you can pop the drives on and off of the board itself for the 3.5 inch they actually mount to the case and then you put the pi into the bottom of the case so we'll go through that process and see how it turns out [Applause] okay this case design definitely doesn't win any awards for uh quickest setup possible but it's functional it's not something that's meant to be changed out on a daily basis i'm actually just going to do three drives for now because there is that spin up issue that could happen with the board that i have and the fact that i would like to have a little more space to work around these drives in the bottom oh it looks like there's still some there's still a little layer of film on here we get to remove it's always exciting this is always the best part yes of getting any new product [Applause] let's get this side on one thing that this particular design doesn't include is any kind of shock mounting for these hard drives so if you wanted to use this in a more permanent installation you should definitely put it on top of some sort of rubber pad or consider using a different kind of case design if you're going to use giant hard drives like these uh the next step is i'm gonna start putting together the rest of this enclosure and i need to look i hope that i didn't just do something backwards did i yeah i just put on one of these two sides backwards so we're gonna redo that and uh oops all right it actually turns out i had these on the completely backwards the back sides of these drives are supposed to be facing back towards you know what i just did this backwards the second time in a row i'm gonna have to turn these around again all right i think that's right finally so it looks like the next part is i'm gonna put on this little cover for the bottom which has a couple ventilation holes or speed holes if you're into cars that was easy enough and then the the pi itself and the whole unit here with the heatsink goes onto the bottom and there's a little slot where the reset button pops out so again the orientation of this thing matters too ports are all towards the back so we can hold actually before i do that i just realized i probably want to get the cables routed from the drives to the board there we go all right so we got our three plugs here i'm gonna get them into the board and uh i should probably put the micro sd card in now since i'm using a light compute module if i don't do that now it's a little bit harder to access it once you put this thing into the unit so i'm going to go ahead and flash raspberry pi os to one of these cards and get it in there all right so i'm writing raspberry pi os to a micro sd card and i'm going to put that in here and then we can put the board in and hopefully it'll just boot up and start working so i have raspberry pi os on here and i'm gonna put it into the case after i plug in these three drives plugging in santa cables blind is not super easy okay we got those three in okay so our hard drives are connected i'm gonna put this in here like so and we'll screw things down now if you have the fourth drive in you might be able to tell that these cables are a little bit uh tight in here so that with that fourth drive you might have to actually bend the cables a tiny bit with this particular enclosure to get them all to fit in without uh kinking too much so i'm gonna get these screws started here all right next up i'm gonna put the fan in and let me move everything over just a tiny bit so i have room for this the fan goes on to this fan plate i sent an arctic f9 pwm case fan which is a good size probably won't be too loud but you could of course use any 4-pin pwm fan with this build since they are standard all right so we got the fan mounted on the plate and it's going to go in here so before i do that since i want the room to plug this in i will plug it into the board and it goes can't really see it inside of here but it goes on to the four pin fan header this is not the most cable managed solution in the world for sure but it should all be good in the end all right and goes in here [Applause] what is it hitting there we go okay so the fan is in and the hard drives are in i'm going to put the top on the case as well with the vent holes in the back okay top is on and the back as well which has a lot of ventilation holes i'll show you how that goes right here and it looks like the top actually goes on after this so back first if it actually goes in now what's it hitting okay there we go and top goes like that all right that is the nas this is a pretty cool little build and it's it's very narrow too which is nice there's two nice things about that one is you could actually put it in this way and it would look just at home or you can have it vertically oriented and it would it would take up a little less space than a giant box like the one that i got from aces store so it's a pretty cool design it is a little bit complicated and like i said you're not going to be hot swapping drives but all the parts of this come apart so that you could take out a drive while it's on and pop on a new one it's just going to be a little bit awkward with all those screws but let's plug this in and boot it up and see what happens so the minimum things that you need to make a functional nas are power and networking i actually have a 12 volt 5 amp power supply which will supply about 60 watts of power enough to power these four drives for sure and even some higher powered drives and like i said the board version that i have can't power up four high power drives at the same time right away and future board revisions will fix that problem but this is a 12 volt 5 amp power supply you need to have a good power supply for any pi project but especially for something that has hard drives to the board like this and then i also have a gigabit network plug here this is coming straight from my home network and i'll plug that into the gigabit jack on the back and i'll plug in the 12 volt power and it looks like everything is powering up i heard the hard drive spinning up and the fan is on and you can see the lights here too so it has three green and three yellow i think another bug that's on this particular version of the board is that the lights might stay powered up even if there's no activity so there's a few little things every project that i've seen for the raspberry pi if you're building a complex hardware board like this there's always going to be some bugsy iron out and this is one of the first revisions of the board that they sent me the final version that's going to be shipped out to people is going to have a lot of these bugs fixed and maybe there will be some new bug too you never know but that's one of the hard things about hardware design is once you build something and ship it and have all the components placed if you find a bug there you can't just rewrite it really quick and have the fix out you have to build a new batch and everything so it's running and i'm going to see if i can see it on my network here all right so i think that the ip address is this dot 114 so i'm going to log in and um let's say ls pci and c so it hit i can see that it's seeing this sata controller now i'm running raspberry pi os 64-bit the beta version and i don't know if it has support for sata built in yet i actually worked on a pull request to make it so that boards like this will work out of the box with pios but i don't know if that's in yet so i'm going to say lsblk and yeah it's not showing those drives yet so next up i'm going to update the os to the latest version and see if that fixes it and sudo apt-get upgrade that's why all right and this upgrade will take a little time so i will use the magic of editing to get us to the point where it's finished all right so i'm going to reboot it looks like it's up so i'm going to log back in and then we'll do sudo ls pci-v to see it doesn't look like it has that it doesn't look like it has the actual kernel module installed so if i say d message it doesn't look like it's actually mounting any of the drives and if i say lsblk i see that there's no extra drives here so it looks like until they actually have that change in a kernel that's shipped out to end users of raspberry pi os you'll actually have to rebuild your kernel like i've shown many times on this channel before so that you can use devices like this because the sata controller is not supported out of the box by raspberry pi os nor ubuntu nor any version any distribution that's shipped for the raspberry pi yet i'm trying to change that i'm trying to make sure that they all have this supported by default because a lot of people are going to start using the compute module 4 with sata controllers like this so until that time you actually have to recompile the linux kernel and i've done that in numerous videos in the past you can go back and look and exactly how that's done but i'll also have a link down in the description to how to do it and i'm going to do that really quick here so that we can get this up and running and see all the hard drives and the key is to make sure that the ahci sata support is selected here this is actually supported in the latest versions of the pi kernel so if you actually follow my directions and clone it this is selected by default so you don't even have to go into menu config to set it up but it hasn't reached end users with the shipping builds of ios quite yet so i'm going to save this and exit and then i'm going to cross compile the kernel and this will take a minute and then i'll copy it over to the wire trustee sata board and it should hopefully boot up and see those drives all right so i copied over the new kernel and rebooted and if i say lspci-vbv now it is showing that it's using the kernel driver ahci so let's check that out with lsblk and c and look there's our disks so these are all these are only 500 gigabyte hard drives they're older sata drives but they can work and i'm not going to go through setting up a raid array in this video or setting up openmediavault i have that in my previous videos which you can see links to all those in the description but this is a pretty nice hardware package for especially compared to the the pi setup that i had for any kind of nas that you're going to build it's also interesting to see their their design which is even smaller for the the 2.5 inch drives so it's a pretty cool mass i i like the the enclosure it's a little bit finicky putting it together and you should probably triple check before you screw in all the hard drives which way they go but especially if you get the 2.5 inch version that's even less of an issue because these just plug straight into the board this is definitely the best nas solution i've seen built for a raspberry pi and it's definitely in the spirit of some of the older older nasa in a box type of solutions for single board computers like the odroid cloud shell or the helios iv and i'm really excited to see where this goes right now it's in it it's not yet available but it they're hoping to start making it this year and you can see it on crowd supply and sign up to be notified when it is available um so i encourage you to do that thanks so much to wire trustee for sending me this review unit to to test it out see how it works verify some of the bugs that they have and also just show other people what's possible with a little bit of imagination building this case and putting everything together and i'm really excited to see where they go with the next revisions if they can get those bugs ironed out and maybe if this is successful what they could do next maybe put in a pci uh switch and put in 2.5 gig networking or have even more drives possibly i'm going to be reviewing some other really cool cm4 boards so make sure you subscribe to see all that and until next time i'm jeff gearling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 316,475

Rating: 4.9405298 out of 5

Keywords: raspberry pi, nas, storage, wiretrustee, sata, network attached storage, hard drive, hdd, solid state disk, ssd, controller, compute module, cm4, compute module 4, pi 4, model b, board, custom, enclosure, server, marvell, kernel, recompile, driver, assemble, assembly, how-to, guide, ahci, pi os, ceph, cluster, homelab, data, backup, omv, openmediavault, open media vault, freenas, open source, design, pci, pci express, gigabit

Id: ahrdx3TYxZc

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/HumanHistory314]

**UPDATE**: I just heard Wiretrustee is postponing production of this board for now due to component shortages and huge price spikes for some of the most important parts :(

Kinda useless at this juncture then

[u/lrdfrd1]

Needs poe. :)

[u/riaqn0]

Meaningless until available for buy.