Tag Archives: Raspberry Pi

Storage

Raspberry Pi NAS

Raspberry Pi NAS
Raspberry Pi NAS

We’ve built a NAS and Docker Staging environment using a Raspberry Pi 5. Our NAS features a 2 TB NVMe SSD drive for fast shared storage on our network.

Raspberry Pi NAS Hardware Components

Raspberry Pi 5 SBC

We use the following components to build our system –

Here’s a photo of the completed hardware assembly –

Pi NAS Internals - Raspberry Pi NAS
Pi NAS Internals

Software Components and Installation

We installed the following software on our system to create our NAS –

CassaOS

CasaOS GUI
CasaOS GUI

CasaOS is included to add a very nice GUI for managing each of our NUT servers. Here’s a useful video on how to install CasaOS on the Raspberry Pi –

Installation

The first step is to install the 64-bit Lite Version of Raspberry Pi OS. This is done by first installing a full desktop version on a flash card and then using Raspberry Pi Imager to install the lite version on our NVMe drive.

Once this installation was done, we used the Raspberry Pi Imager to install the same OS version on our NVMe SSD. After removing the flash card and booting to the NVMe SSD, the following configuration changes were made –

  • The system name is set to NAS-12
  • Enabled SSH
  • Set our user ID and password
  • Applied all available updates
  • We updated /boot/firmware/config.txt to enable PCIe Gen3 operation with our SSD

We used the process covered in the video above to install CasaOS.

CasaOS makes all of its shares public and does not password-protect shared folders. While this may be acceptable for home use where the network is isolated from the public Internet, it certainly is not a good security practice.

Fortunately, the Debian Linux-derived distro we are running includes Samba file share support, which we can use to protect our shares properly. This article explains the basics of how to do this.

Here’s an example of the information in smb.conf for one of our shares –

[Public]
    path = /DATA/Public
    browsable = yes
    writeable = Yes
    create mask = 0644
    directory mask = 0755
    public = no
    comment = "General purpose public share"

You will also need to create a Samba user for your Samba shares to work. Samba user privileges can be added to any of the existing Raspberry Pi OS users with the following command –

# sudo smbpasswd -a <User ID to add>

It’s also important to correctly set the shared folder’s owner, group, and modes.

We need to restart the Samba service anytime configuration changes are made. This can be done with the following command –

# sudo systemctl restart smbd