Smallest 6 Bay 2.5 SATA SSD NAS Build | Cheap NAS using Mini PC | DIY NAS using LattePanda Sigma SBC

network attached storage or Nas devices have become an integral part of today's Tech user daily workflows with the constant rise of storage needs and skyrocketing costs of managed backup Solutions more and more users are opting for either a pre-built Nas solution or doing DIY builds with operating systems like the true Nas or the Android though there are many solutions available based off of 3.5 in dis Drive in various Bay sizes there are hardly any out there that supports only 2.5 in drives which are generally a great win for size and weight with SATA ssds like the Samsung 8 tby 1 I feel like this could make for some really powerful and compact solutions for people who like to keep their gear portable and travel friendly in one of my recent videos I showed a custom direct attach enclosure using only 2.5 in drives which received a lot of support from you guys and as promised in that video today I'm taking that build to a whole new level by converting it to a fully working portable NZ with only 2.5 in ssds inside it I hope you enjoy the video at the heart of any Nas solution we need a compute module that can provide the SATA connections manage the drives and set up the network shares for this we can even get away with a single board computer also known as sbcs with at least four processing CES and 8 GB of RAM a good starting point are the mini PCS these days which come with very capable sbcs and also often hosts at least one or two m.2 mvme slot which can be used to spin up the required seta ports also if you want the barebone SBC there are options like the X1 based on x86 architecture which works great too in my build I am actually using this LTE panda the sigma board which is a little bit of an overkill for this project but I already had this for another project so I decided to go with it the next part we need for this build is an nvme to SATA adapter card here I am using one with six SATA ports which will accommodate all the dries that I'm planning to use we also need a cage for our drives preferably one with a SATA back plane and here I'm using the 6 Bay 2.5 in hot swap cage that comes with two Molex power inputs this will make our power management a bit cleaner finally we need a solution for our Molex power inputs to the drives and I will use the same P PSU that I used in my Das build this PSU has one SATA power output and another Molex power output in it so I had to use a SATA to Molex adapter to create two Molex outputs which can together power the drive pay cage I started the build by working on the nvme slots first in my SBC I actually have two nvme keys which is why I'm using one for an OS drive but if you don't have two on yours you can always use any available seta ports or even an USB port to connect the normal seta drive for the OS I installed the nvme to SATA adapter card on the available m.2 key and connected these custom SATA cables that came with the cage I did some rudimentary cable management and moved on to install the drives into the cage I'm using a few team group SATA SSD drives for my prototype here but you can use pretty much any drive or any capacity here including 2.5 in this drive if you want to the installation was pretty straightforward and these nice little hot swap Bays made the job super easy now coming back to the main board I built a few 40 mm standoffs out of a few smaller ones to create a gap between the bottom plate and the board board primarily to make room for the Sata cable bands and also to Cable manage and install other parts like the PSU please note that you can use a heat SN on any open nvme drives here as well if you want which I skipped the SATA cables were pretty rigid and to reduce the stress on the adapter board I attached them with Jeep dice to the standoff screws which took the strain off I fixed the main board setup to the cage using some double-sided tapes which you can screw on to the K as well if you want to I used the simple jumper for the P PSU ATX Port connected the Molex out puts to the drive case and then fix the PSU in the gap between the cage and the board I routed the SATA cables to the cage inputs and cable managed as tightly as I could to make the fruit print compact at this point it felt like a good idea to test out if the drives were showing up in the portal before moving any further my SBC actually had Windows already installed in it and after connecting the whole rig all the six drives showed up in the windows Drive manager which was a great sign I used an external 12vt power adapter for the pkpu for this quick test however we will show an interesting solution to that in the next phase of our build so the PCO PSU requires a constant voltage input somewhere in the range of 12 Vol to 19 volts if you notice closely most of the single board computers also taking a DC input in the same voltage range to avoid having to take two DC inputs for the board in the dries all we need to do is to somehow route that board voltage to the PK PSU at the required level in the SBC I'm using the input comes in at 9vt and is available on these pinouts near the DC input I use the gstd cable connector to pull out one of the 19 volt channels and sealed up the other ones for safety I also tested the voltage to be 100% sure now to use this 19 volt input into our picopsu which operates at 12 volt we need to step down the voltage to 12 which is where these tiny little Transformers called Buck converters come into play with its inbuilt potential meter you can adjust the output to whatever step down voltage you want and then use the output voltage to power the downstream circuits I set the output voltage to around 12 volt and attach the DC Barrel output connector to this converter's output sealed up the whole Contraption with some heat resistant tapes to make it ready to be used as a power source for our PSU there was a slight mismatch in the size between the DC Barrel connectors so I had to use a converter for that I checked the voltages one last time to be completely safe and then finished up all the connections along with some more cable managements just like this we created a single power input solution to drive both the SBC and the drive cage finally since the inbu power button of the board would not have been reachable once we would build a case for this I used an external power switch and connected it to the front panel headers which we will install onto the case in the next phase tested the whole Contraption once again and it worked like a charm that gave me a lot of confidence to move on to the next phase now that our brains of the operations was completely functional and put together as a single unit all we needed to do was to create a case for it unlike last time I actually built a full case this time and used Walnut teamed ply boards as the base material the idea for the case was very simple estimate the the smallest possible volume that would Encompass everything and then build a box shaped case around it the only thing that we wanted to keep in mind were a few holes mainly for the air intake and exhausts the power input button and SBC input panels please forgive me for my poor craftsmanship here on this case building as I'm sure anyone with good expertise in woodworking will do a much better job than this and also there's always the route of 3D printing to take should you wish to for me it's more about building a complete prototype with working internals rather than worrying too much about Aesthetics I did the best I could sealed off the sharp Corners with some black guards and finally it came to life overall I was very happy with the way it turned out and it definitely shares the same DNA as the direct attached enclosure I built in my last video with the hardware build complete it was time for us to move on to the software part of the project we are going to use the true Nas core us here which is a free Nas OS and is one of the best ones that I have used so far the only caveat for using true Nas is that it needs all the drives to be of the same size in every vdv and sometimes it can be resource intensive as compared to each beers other than that it's pretty much the best you can ask for in terms of usability you can easily download the ISO file from the official website and barn it on USB drive using your favorite boot Drive creation software I'm using one called bellena iter here which was suggested by one of the videos on YouTube Once done we connect our device to the network insert the bootable Drive turn it on in the boot mode and walk through the installation process which is pretty straightforward and intuitive the only thing worth noting here is to take note of the root password which is going to be necessary later once completed it should show a ready prompt with the IP address and the port of this Nas on which this machine will be accessible through the traz management UI portal disconnect everything else from this device at this point except the network cable and the power and we are ready to get started with using this NZ from another device on the same network we go to the IP address noted before where we'll be able to log into the true Nas management portal running on our new Nas you can set up the storage pools from here add users set up permissions and SMB shares following the standard workflows there are countless number of tutorials online walking through all of these steps in details so I would not dive too much deeper into these we can also monitor the health and utilization of resources in this portal finally once my SMB shares were ready I MA them as a remote drive on my computer and started using it initial speed test showed a full utilization of my network card 2.5g bandwidth which was amazing I hope you enjoyed this build and learned a thing or two from it even if you don't go about building your own nest following this if you're interested in random custom builds like this please leave a thumbs up on this video and consider subscribing to my channel if you have any ideas for improvements or future projects do let me know in the comments below as always thanks for tuning in lettuce density I will see you in the next one

Channel: LatticeDensity

Views: 35,400

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Id: CcZQjRdqUHI

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2024