Professional Looking Raspberry Pi NAS “From the Ground Up”

If you need to access files from a variety of different places with a number of computing devices, a network-attached storage server is a very convenient. One of the coolest things about these units is that while you can buy a dedicated device to serve up files, you can also create one using a Raspberry Pi with a hard drive attached. This is a fairly common hack, but the aesthetics of these builds, as “tobychui” notes in his write-up, tend to be rather poor.

Instead, tobychui decided to make his own NAS from the ground up — defined here as not using parts specifically designed for Raspberry Pi NAS devices. He 3D-printed an enclosure to hold the Pi and two HDD bays, along with space for a cooling fan. A custom power supply board was also constructed, with a relay and low-cost Arduino for control. Buttons and LEDs from the Pi’s GPIO pins provide a limited user interface.

If you’d like to try something similar, a normal open source NAS software package is typically recommended. Since the goal is to build a NAS from scratch, a new software package for it is in the work as well, but it will reportedly take years of development before it’s able to run smoothly.