Pi 5 NAS Box

Now that we can take advantage of the PCIe connector on the Pi 5 and hook up an M.2 SSD drive, it’s only natural to build a Pi NAS with this setup.

Components

For this build, I am using a Pi 5, PCIe adapter (Pineberry Pi HatDrive), M.2 NVMe drive, and an SD card. OMV doesn’t let you use the same drive for the OS and the files, so an SD card is needed to store the operating system. I’ll be using Raspberry Pi’s official PSU but you can use any suitable power supply.

The active cooler is not required for this build since I won’t be running any resource-intensive operations on the Pi. But, if you plan to use your Pi 5 for other things, then the Active Cooler might be needed. It’s only $5 dollars, so I figured I would add it to my build.

All in all, this setup cost me $144. Here’s the breakdown:

• Pi 5 8GB: $80.00
• HatDrive: $28
• 128GB NVMe SSD: $15.00
• SD Card: $8.00
• PSU: $12.00
• Case: $1.00 – I’m adding $1 as a symbolic amount since I 3D printed this case

This is a pretty slim setup with an affordable 128GB SSD. I’m only going to be using this Pis NAS to transfer files between computers and store files temporarily. But if you want something with more capacity, 1TB NVME SSDs are going for around $70 on Amazon. The higher capacity SSD would bring the total cost of the Pi 5 NAS to just below $200.

Here’s a video going through the process of setting the Pi as a NAS and comparing it to the Pi 4, the Rock 5B, and a Mini PC.

Case

A quick note about the case. This is a design by Adafruit. Although it’s a great design, access to the Pi 5 power button is fiddly at best. You would have to stick something in the hole to push the power button on the Pi 5. This is a system that will be on 24/7, so this won’t be an issue for my use case. But, keep that in mind if you are planning on using this case for another purpose.

The reason why I am not using the official Raspberry Pi case is because it doesn’t have a slot for the PCIe cable and I would not be able to add the top lid to the case. Leaving the Pi 5 exposed without the lid is an option, but that kinda defeats the purpose of using a case in the first place.

Software

Open Media Vault (OMV) is compatible with ARM computers, like the Raspberry Pi. Other popular NAS OSes, like TrueNAS, are not compatible with ARM. So, OMV is the winner here.

OMV doesn’t work with desktop environment installs, so make sure to install the Lite version of the Raspberry Pi OS. A word of caution: OMV Bookworm support is still in beta, but I have been using it for a couple of weeks now with no issues. Again, this is for file transfer. If I were using it as a backup system, I would not be using beta software.

Now that we have Raspberry Pi OS Lite running, we need to run the command below to get OMV installed. It’s a good idea to have the Pi connected to a network cable at this point. You can find more information about the OMV install script on the project’s GitHub page.

sudo wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

I kept getting errors installing OMV, so I had to bypass the network configuration steps from the install script.

wget https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install
chmod +x install
sudo ./install -n

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Pineberry Pi PCIe HatDrive! Bottom: https://amzn.to/3Vt1Yup
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