My Pet NAS

I got into a frivolous hobby as an escape from the routine feature flipping and AI duckfeeding at work.

At first I got a Raspberry Pi as a low stakes way to learn Linux things, but one thing led to another, and now I have a NAS, an ad-blocking DNS sinkhole, and a Linux server on my home network (blogs tbd).

Physical electronics was always intimidating to me, so I set myself the smallest goal of just using it for image storage and backup in order to wean off 3+ subscriptions for cloud storage.

Unlike software, hardware choices aren’t easily reversible. There seemed to be 6 times the decisions to make compared to shopping for an ergo keyboard.

I probably spent 6 months reading up on whether to:

• build my own Raspberry Pi NAS with 2 hard drives or buying a sexy NAS enclosure that would work right off the shelf with a .¹
• which RAID configuration to use on the setup
• which filesystem format the hard drives (the moral question of whether to format the nas and storage partitions with btrfs, ext4, or zfs)
• the 3-2-1 backup strategy for the setup

The resultant setup:

• 1 2 * micro SD cards
• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4GB RAM
• Western Digital Red Plus Internal NAS HDD 3.5” - 6TB
• Seagate BarraCuda Internal SATA 3.5” - 4TB
• Geekworm NASPi Gemini 3.5 Dual 3.5” SATA HDD NAS Storage Kit as enclosure with a 12 V 5A power supply adapter

Everything cost about ~$1000 CAD and most of it went to hard disks, which I waited til Black Friday to buy from Newegg.

Services I’m running

• Immich for photo and video storage
• ufw, ufw-docker and Fail2ban for firewalling and intrusion detection
• tailscale as a VPN-of-sorts for remote access from outside the home
• hd-idle to spin down hard disks when they’re not in use
• Prometheus to monitor system performance
• Node Exporter to scrape system performance metrics
• Grafana for fancy dashboards
• a cron schedule for quarterly disk scrubbing

It’s beautiful!

What I learned

• It’s not necessary to have both drives be the same brand or exactly the same storage size and format. I created a RAID 1 partition in btrfs and use the remaining 2TB for file and logstorage.

• I initially installed a 32-bit OS (debian-bookworm), which Immich didn’t support, so I had to re-image the other card with a 64-bit one.

• Low power consumption is one of the main perks of single board computers, but one of the drawbacks also when building a NAS like this. I went with the Geekworm enclosure because it had its own power supply so I wouldn’t have to think about how to power 2 separate USB hubs to transfer data to 2 hard drives. Every peripheral consumes power such that plugging an extra tiny USB monitor can cause this setup to run out of memory.

• Frequently writing to micro SD can cause it to wear out faster so I had to move whatever had a lot of writing activity to the storage partition of the NAS drive, like SWAP ram, logs, and backups for syncthing.

• It’s better to have a USB key or 2 on hand sooner than later. It’s nice to use as a substitute storage early on but they come in handy for reimaging anything later.

To use cloud or not for offsite backup

A segment of the homelab community seem to prefer keeping things off cloud due to distrust of big tech’s everchanging privacy policies, but according to the “offsite” piece of the 3-2-1 backup strategy… I can’t think of how that offsite backup can be kept in sync without using a cloud service.

And how “off-site” is offsite anyway? Would a backyard shed running starlink count? In that case, a local network transfer would be possible.

Backblaze seems like a popular options but I haven’t implemented it yet.