Edit: thanks everyone for the suggestions. In the end I decided to buy a icy box usb3.1 4xhdd enclosure for around 100€. In the description it says it only works with mac and windows, but my Linux laptop works well with it, I guess the pi will to as well. I will print an enclosure for the power brick and the pi to screw to the drive case.

Here is why I choose this option: The pi is rather cheap compared to its power and also power consumption. I already had 4x4tb HDDs which I wanted to use, so at least 4 slots needed. The pi has 2x usb 3.0 connections which can be used simultaneously. One will be used for the 4bay, the other is free for now. I have the option to connect a second Nas case if I need more storage. Usb 3.0 is pretty fast, even if I don’t get all the 5gbit/s. It’s still faster than 1gbit/s ethernet.

I also thought about getting 2x 2xhdd enclosures to use the two usb3.0 at the same time. But decided against it because it would be a little more sketchy and I wanted to keep a free usb port for a second drive enclosure.

There are some enclosures that offer raid (hardware raid?) But I could not figure out if that would mean that all 4 drives will be raided, so I decided for the cheaper variant and would do the raid myself.

I plan on running 2 drives as raid1 and the other as raid 0 for secure storage and the other for movies and stuff I can download again.

Thanks again for all the comments!

It seems weirdly difficult to find a good solution to attach HDDs to my pi. Best case would be for me a enclosure with small power supply, space for my pi, and at least 2 bays for HDDs, rather 4. All that for under 100€ of cause :D

I could not really find cheap hhd enclosures that connect via usb. Any recommendations? I don’t really want to use HDD toasters, they feel not permanent enough for a Nas. I could also not find sata to usb hats for the pi that are available right now

  • rambos@lemm.eeEnglish
    21·
    11 months ago

    Pi NAS is a big pile of cables and adapters IMO. You can buy used PC with multiple SATA or M2 ports for 100€

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      yeah, once you have the drives, building the rest of the system can be done for dummy cheap if you look at like cheap used workstations that some company or school is offloading. and it would still probably be a more capable system all around.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    11 months ago

    It seems weirdly difficult to find a good solution to attach HDDs to my pi.

    Being a nas is not at all what a pi is made for. So it’s not surprising at all.

    • JohnnyWanker@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      51·
      11 months ago

      The Raspberry Pi would be a great low power device to have always on with some storage attached to backup to, store family photos, etc.

      So not a high performance NAS, but good enough for this use case.

  • krigo666@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    There are several solutions but will be above the budget. Best solution is the Argon Eon case for the RPi 4. I’m waiting for a version for the RPi 5.

    Can house the Pi and either 4x 2.5" drives or 2x 2.5" and 2x 3.5" drives, all SATA.

  • pl_woah@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    You can do it. I use a powered USB hub and a raspberry pi, and 5 hard drives.

    It is a mess of cables but was simple enough.

    I also sprang for a UPS because most filesystem’s I tried like zfs and btrfs didn’t appreciate random brownouts from running 4 drives off the pi itself.

    Right now they’re xfs and used for a minio install and torrent storage

  • loganb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I dont know if this qualifies as a “toaster” but Ive used this docking bay in the past for a NAS and it served my purposes decently well. One thing to keep in mind is that random IO will be lacking with a usb interface. Also, this particular chipset does powercycle all the drives when one is removed so drive swaps end up requiring you to power the entire system off to perform. Also no integrated cooling may be a deal breaker as you illuded to.

    If I was basing a nas build off of a PI, I would look to use the PCIe 1x2.0 interface on the pi 5 as a HBA.

  • fart_pickle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’m using terramaster as hdd enclosure. I have two of those, both connected to lenovo thinkcentre. I’ve tried rpi but I needed more power hence the lenovo thingy.

  • IndustryStandard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    11 months ago

    M2 is getting so cheap that having a drive spinning all day can add up in electricity whereas m2 is a lot more efficient.

      • IndustryStandard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        11 months ago

        M2 isn’t much more expensive than HDDs anymore. It used to be five times times the cost. Now maybe 1.5 to 2 times. And they require a lot less space and no dedicated backplane with seperate power.

        Also you need redundancy. A 20TB hdd is very expensive and usually very overkill. Rebuilding them takes very long if you ever have corruption issues, along with other problems.

        It’s better to have three smaller drives than a single 20TB one.

        Unless you’re running an actual datacenter with cooling and big rack space, m.2 is a likely more worth it these days for a small home NAS.