Hello everyone and welcome to the workshop!
During the last video we set up the Pi 5 with the HatDrive from Pineberry Pi, allowing us to
connect an nvme drive to the PCIe connector. So, it's only natural that today we're going to be
building a NAS with our Pi 5. Before we get into building, a little bit of a backstory. I've been
using this Banana Pi M2 Berry for a little bit over 6 years now I just use it to share files
between my devices here home and also to have access to some files when I'm away through my home
VPN service The reason why I chose this specific SBC is because it has a SATA port it has been
working pretty well since I set it up but the transfer speeds are not that great The years
just went by and I never touched it because it was just working. But now, it's to do for an
upgrade. So, today I'm going to be replacing a banana with a raspberry. I'm going to be
running Open Media Vault, or OMV for short, on the Pi 5 and I'm pretty sure it's going to be
much faster than this old Banana Pi. But how does it compare to the Pi 4 or how does it compare
to other SBCs that are not named after a fruit, like the rock 5B? For this build, I'm
going to be using a Pi 5, a Micro SD card, a Pineberry Pi HatDrive - I have a video on it
linked somewhere here - and an SSD drive and this 3D printed case. The reason why I still have
the SD card listed is because OMV doesn't let you use the same drive for the files and the OS.
So, I'm going to be installing the OS directly on the SD drive but then my files are going
to be hosted on the SSD drive. And of course, you also need a PSU. I'm going to be using the
official Raspberry Pi PSU but you can use any suitable PSU. I'm also going to be using the
Active Cooler but it's not really needed for this kind of build. But it's only $5 so, why not?
The 3D printer case is a design by Adafruit that I made a small modification to be able to fit the
HatDrive to the bottom of the case so shout out to Adafruit for providing step files and making
it super easy to edit the design. All in all, the setup cost me $144. So, here's the breakdown. A
Pi 5 8GB is $80. HatDrive $28. 128GB mvme was around $15 on Amazon. SD card $8. PSU - the official
Raspberry Pi PSU - $12. And I'm adding $1 as a symbolic amount for the 3D-printed case. This is a
pretty slim build with 128 GB of storage. I only use it to transfer files between computers here
at home or to have access to some files while I'm on the road. So, if you need more storage you
can find a 1 TB SSD for around $70 on Amazon So that would bring your build to about $200. So,
it's still pretty good. A quick note about the case although it's a great design, access to the
power button is fiddly at best. You would have to stick something in there to have access to the Pi 5
power button. In my case, I'm going to be using it as a NAS and it's going to be on 24/7. So, it's not
really an issue for me. I thought about using the official Raspberry Pi case, but it doesn't have
this lot for the PCIE cable I could leave the lid off of the case but then that kind of defeats
the purpose of putting the Pi 5 in the case in the first place. Now that we have all the hardware set
up, let's take a look at software. Like I mentioned, I'm going to be using OMV. OMV is compatible with
ARM computers, unlike other NAS Solutions like True NAS, which is not comparable with ARM. So OMV makes
it super easy to create shared folders and make it available to all computers in your network. To
get OMV running you have to install the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS. OMV is not compatible
with desktop environments so make sure to choose the light version when you're installing. A word
of caution that bookworm support for OMV is still in beta, so, like I said, I'm only using this to
share files in my network if I was using this as a backup solution, I wouldn't be using beta software.
After you have Raspberry Pi OS lite running on your Raspberry Pi it's time to use the command
listed on the screen to get OMV installed. It's a good idea to have the network cable plugged into
your Pi 5 at this point. When I was installing OMV I kept running into errors and I realized that it
was due to the network configuration part of the install script. So I used the command that you see on
the screen now to install my Pi 5 I'm guessing that I'm not the first person to run into network
configuration issues and that's why they have parameters to bypass that in the install script.
By the way, I have all of the information from this video linked down below in the blog post and it
has all the commands and everything that you need to set up OMV on your Pi 5. And, after OMV was running
all you have to do is go to the admin page and log in with admin and open media vault as the password.
The first thing that I did was to go to the user section of the admin page and create a brand new
user and set a very secure password. The drive that I'm using for the files was already formatted
so I was able to just mount it. Easy! From here I created a shared folder and I gave permission to
my user to write and read files from this shared folder. Peasy! Finally, I enabled the SMB service so
I can access the files from any device here in my network including Windows devices. Lemon squeezy!
Speaking of Windows, here we are in File Explorer and all I have to do is either use the Pi's IP
address or the host name to get to my files. And, I just have to enter my credentials and voila, here
we are! On Linux, is just as easy I can just add SMB at the beginning of the file location and enter my
credentials. I can also edit fstab and make sure that my drive is getting mounted when the system
boots up. So, let's talk about transfer speeds! I ran some tests and the write and the read speeds were
saturating the 1gb network that I have here in my house. The speeds were hovering between 850 and
900 megabits per second but do you really need the m.2 drive plugged into the HatDrive to get those speeds?
It turns out you don't! I unplugged the m.2 HAT and I use an SSD through a USB adapter and I
got the exact same speeds. Even though the speeds are not better with the m.2 drive I think I still
like the setup better, just because it's one unit and it doesn't have the cumbersome USB adapter attached to it. And it fits nicely here on this shelf in my network rack. And you must be asking
yourself, what about the Pi 4? It also has gigabit Ethernet! Are the speeds the same? Well, I tested that
out. I remove the SD card from my Pi 5 and the USB SSD and I plugged into my Pi 4. One thing that is
nice about Raspberry Pi OS is that you can just unplug from one Raspberry Pi and plug into a
different Raspberry Pi and it just works out of the box, the read speeds over the network on the
Pi 4 were exactly the same as the Pi 5 but the big difference was in the write speeds. The
write speed on Pi 4 was about half the speed as the Pi 5. So, compared to the Pi 5 using the USB
adapter, the Pi 5 is still much faster for writing files to your NAS drive than the Pi 4. So for
comparison sake I got my Rock 5B out and I also set up OMV on it using the exact same SSD drive.
I have to say setting up OMV on the Rock 5B wasn't as easy. I first tried setting it up on top
of the image provided by Radxa, and that didn't work so I had to download Armbian but then I didn't
know the Armbian, by default, doesn't boot from EMMC so I had to write the image through an SD card and
then install OMV, and then everything was working fine! The transfer speeds over the network for the
Rock 5B were exactly the same as the Pi 5. That just goes to show that the limiting factor is the
gigabit Network on the Pi 5. Keep in mind that the Rock 5B does have 2.5 gbit and and onboard m.2
adapter so there is no need for a separate adapter like the Pi 5. But, I don't have a way to test if
the rock 5B would be faster over the network because I don't have 2.5 gabit networking here at
my house. But that might be the theme of a future video. So, now that we know the transfer speeds
let's take a look at power usage. All of the systems that we tested here range from 4 watts to
6 watts on idle. So, based on the rates here in my area the difference between a 4-watt system and a
6-watt system over a period of a whole year is only $3 So, yeah less than a coffee from my neighborhood
coffee shop. Uh hold on a second, you want more? You want me to compare the Pi 5 with a Mini PC? Well,
it turns out I did! So, of course unsurprisingly the speeds were exactly the same as the Pi 5 because
everything is being limited by my 1 gbit network If you're only planning on using your Pi 5 as
a NAS and you're only have 1 gbit network, the Pi 5 is definitely the winner over the Mini PC
because the mini PC cost me $50 more than the Pii 5 setup and the energy consumption is also
quite a bit higher, almost double. Let me know in the comments below what do you think about a
video in the future comparing the Pi 5 to a Mini PC? Anyway, I think this is it for this video. I'm
pretty happy that I have a faster system now to transfer files between my devices here
at home and I'm definitely going to be experimenting more with the Pi 5 in the
future. I'll see you guys in the next one!
