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ARM box as home NAS replacement?

VPS Hosting by Buenos 13 replies 4.4K views
Buenos

Member OP

#1

Brother, I have been thinking ¿why not¿ get one of those cheap ARM SBC boxes and use it for NAS at home. My current setup is very old and very loud, jaja. I see some with USB 3.0 ports and SATA hats. Is very tempting for the price.

Plan is very simple: attach two 4TB drives via USB, run OpenMediaVault or maybe TrueNAS SCALE if they have ARM builds. I know USB is very not ideal but for light home use ¿how bad can it be¿

Has anyone tried this brother. What is very your experience with USB bandwidth for RAID1 mirror!

svendeal

Member

Deal Sniper

#2

Not work? My pi4 with two drives kept dropping one disk and rebuild took forever? Also the usb bus is shared with ethernet on some boards so your network speed is very bad? No capitalization because why bother

world record: 4min Arch install
jane_ffm

Member

#3

Thanks for raising this, Buenos. USB bandwidth is indeed a common concern for ARM-based NAS builds.

  • USB 3.0 theoretical max: 5 Gbps (shared across all ports)
  • Real-world sustained throughput: often 300-400 MB/s total
  • SATA hat via GPIO/PCIe: typically better stability

If you're set on this path, I'd suggest:

  • Single-drive pool with backup to cloud, rather than RAID
  • Active cooling mandatory for 24/7 use
  • Check if your board has dedicated SATA or NVMe lanes

Happy to check our Contabo ARM VPS options via DM if remote storage works for your use case — sometimes a hybrid setup solves both problems.

— Jane @ Contabo

Single mode till I die 💀
Ricardo77

Member

White Label

7 #4

It should be noted that value-added redistribution opportunities exist within this partner ecosystem for those seeking to leverage turnkey storage solutions. The synergy between low-power ARM architectures and distributed backup strategies can be leveraged to create additional value streams. When USB bandwidth constraints are encountered, a synergistic approach involving cloud-tiered storage is recommended by many within the value-added redistribution community. The partner ecosystem continues to evolve, and those who leverage these synergies early will find their value-added redistribution margins favorably positioned.

FR

Member

#5

Mano I had same problem with pi4 and usb drives dropping, very annoying nossa

PacketpunkUma

Member

#6

USB RAID rebuild times must be painful. How long did yours take?

svendeal

Member

Deal Sniper

#7

Sorry for the late reply, was away from the forums

PacketpunkUma said:
How long did yours take?

Honestly I never timed it properly but it was more than a day for sure, maybe two? The pi was basically unusable for anything else during that time

I ended up moving the drives to an old small form factor Dell instead, much more reliable even if it uses a bit more power

The shared bus thing is real though, if your board does that then your network throughput tanks whenever the disks are busy

Might still be fine for a single drive backup target but I wouldn't trust USB RAID for anything I actually cared about

world record: 4min Arch install
jane_ffm

Member

#8

23 days and no follow-up from svendeal makes me think they moved on or the board died For anyone still watching: Contabo — https://contabo.com — has a small ARM lab box we loan out for exactly this kind of test, no charge for two weeks if you cover shipping back Drop me a PM if you want to stress-test your exact drive combo before buying anything

Single mode till I die 💀
jihoonred86

Member

Seoul

#9

That's the part that would worry me most — not raw throughput but contention between disk and network hitting the same controller. I looked at a few boards last year and the spec sheets rarely make it obvious which ports share lanes. Has anyone found a good way to check that before buying, short of just plugging everything in and running iperf + fio at the same time.

herebungkus

Member

🌏 SEA represent

#10

I have a KnownHost RK3568 box sitting here and I am wondering if two drives over USB is asking for trouble or genuinely fine for just media storage. The SATA hat for this board is out of stock everywhere so USB is the only path right now.

svendeal said:
My pi4 with two drives kept dropping one disk and rebuild took forever?
Was that with a powered hub or straight off the board ports. I have seen people say a good hub fixes the dropouts but I do not know if that is just cope.

wrap it, ship it, pray it

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