2025-07-19
A few years ago I wanted a new NAS. Not a big datahoarder monstrosity, just a small device with a few TB's of storage to put some personal files on and have them easily accessible from multiple computers.
In the past my go-to solution for home servers was using older Dell or HP small form factor desktops, that I saved from the dumpster at work. Mostly 5-ish year old devices that were heavily used. These were free, but after having run a 3 as small servers, I concluded they were not ideal. Having 3 of them running 24/7 at home was starting to add up in terms of power usage and fan noise. And I was beginning to suspect one or more power supplies of being wonky. They weren´t very power hungry, about 15w idle if I recall, but still.
The fan noise of the old boxes was really starting to annoy me, since they sat not far from the desk. I wanted absolute silence, lower power and I wanted it cheap. If this new nas worked well, I could maybe build a second server like it to handle the other tasks of the noisy pile of desktops.
So the requirements were:
- Cheap: aiming for much cheaper than a Synology box.
- Silent: no noise at all! This meant a fanless power supply and flash storage.
- Low power: Ideally under 10w idle.
- Super easy: I want this thing to just work and keep working. This meant simple to set up, simple to keep running and simple to repair if it breaks.
I came up with this:
A Pi CM4 on the official I/O board. The Raspbian OS is running from EMMC and for storage there is a 4TB NVME SSD sitting in a PCI-E adapter.
A 4TB SSD drive was the largest capacity single drive that fit my budget. The SSD is a kingston NV2, which was the absolute cheapest you could get at the time. Its a bit dodgy in the sense that Kingston makes this model with varying components. But my 1gb/s LAN is going to be the speed bottleneck anyway and I have a backup of the data in case the drive dies. I also won´t have any write-intensive workloads running on the nas, its just hosting some photo's, documents and media files.
The only thing I really miss is the ability to install multiple SSD's. I don't really need the uptime benefits of RAID for my purposes, but it would have been nice to have a proper SSD to boot from instead of the CM4's EMMC, or the possibility to expand the storage later on.
This might seem like using a pi for the sake of it and maybe it is. After all, a small, second hand, x86 box would be far more powerful, comparable in price and probably more expandable as well, while not using that much more power if you chose the the right components. But:
- Fanless x86 pc´s are uncommon, although there are some options like a refurbished thin client.
- I planned on running multiple of these and if I went with something like a thin client, each would need its own power brick. While I can run a lot of these from one 12V power supply. (More on that later.)
- Raspberry pi's have great software support and you can find a lot of info, tips and tricks on them.
- I think it looks cooler :-)
I designed and 3d-printed a base plate for the I/O module so it's bare PCB is not just sitting on my workbench. And also a little arm that attaches to the side of the base and holds to PCI-E card, so it doesn't flop around.
I drew the parts in OpenSCAD. If you want the design files, you can send me an email, the email address is on the home page. Or you can get the files on printables.com.
Currently I run two CM4's with I/O boards off of this power supply:
It's a Mean Well LRS-100-12. The setup is a bit dodgy but it's a quality power supply that's not making any noise. For the moment it is lying somewhere at the back of my lab bench. I should really fabricate a proper case for it but it has worked well for years now. I did install the plastic cover over the terminals and I do have a smoke alarm in the room :-)