Retiring Raspberry Pi 4 as Home Server and NAS
20 Jan 2025Table of Contents
- Good Start for Self-Hosting
- Lack of NAS Capacity
- Looking for a Successor
- Unexpected
- Setting up z170a
- Power Consumption
Good Start for Self-Hosting
The little Raspberry Pi 4 (RP4) served me well in the last two years. I used it to host NextCloud/Syncthing for syncing files between devices, scraping financial data from Yahoo Finance and TimeMachine for MacOS backup.
The latest addition to the service stack is paperless-ngx. It allows
my Canon printer/scanner to send digital copies of documents directly
to the RP4 or Gmail.
The RP4 handles all the demands without showing any signs of struggle. It costs as little as 6kW per hour while the Xbox One S draws 11kW while sleeping. Thanks to the energy crisis in the UK, I started to appreciate the energy efficiency of RP4. The ARM chips in it really impressed me.
Lack of NAS Capacity
A 3TB portal hard drive (WD My Passport) was attached to the PR4 to store media data. The USB 3.0 connector is surprisingly stable and fast. With both ends connected by ethernet cables, the file transfer speed can reach up to 100 MB/s. When my MacBook Pro uses Wi-Fi, the speed drops to about 40-50 MB/s but it is still great because of the convenience.
Later I started using it as a NAS to store the Final Cut Pro library. The 4k home gym videos I shot using iPhone 12 Pro are numerous 1! The hard drive keeps getting filled up.
I can get another portal hard drive, but then it will get filled up again, say in less than a month? So it occurred to me that I need a proper home server with full NAS capacity.
Looking for a Successor
I did a bit of research but I am not able to find a good product. I suspect the reason is the NAS build is a niche area while the PC industry is gaming-centric, focusing on getting faster, bigger, and fancier hardware with unnecessary RGB lights, that is where the profits are I presume.
I came across some innovative products on AliExpress from China, such as the TopTon N5105 board. It is more powerful, consumes slightly more electricity, and it has 6 SATA cables! It would be a perfect successor for my PR4.
But I am not comfortable ordering electronic stuff from AliExpress, returning it or sending it back for repair would be a nightmare.
PS: The company is growing fast, it continued to innovate, and the product lines extended to Intel N100 with an additional NVME drive and a USB-C. Their website and marketing materials look notched up quite a bit. I kind of regret not taking the risk back then.
Unexpected
The other day, I was re-organising (again) my home office, so had to move a bookshelf. I started moving it without taking everything off, then a motherboard fell off. It was the z170a with an i5-6600k and a heat sink attached to it. The motherboard was in my first desktop that I purchased 10 years ago when I started participating in Kaggle competitions in 2014.
After a quick inspection, I saw some pins were bent. I felt ashamed and sorry for the motherboard that I had not taken care of it. So I made a promise: if it survived the fall, I would use it for my NAS.
Well, it did so I found my NAS.
Setting up z170a
While putting it up, one SATA port was snapped and came up, but the rest is still fine. Apart from that, everything else went smoothly. The Debian 12 became much easier to install with the isohybrid technology and the non-free firmware is now part of the installation image itself.
The server setup scripts and configuration are saved in a selfhosted-services git repository so restoring the services took little efforts.
I had one little trick: I assigned the IP address of RP4 to the new z170a server so that on the client side I didn’t have to change anything. This was achieved rather easily: few clicks in the ASUS router web UI and then a reboot.
While setting it up, I noticed the z170a system is much more responsive, thanks to the 3.5 GHz i5-6600k CPU and a much faster SSD over the SD card. I was able to run multiple processes at the same time.
The longest part is copying files from the 3TB portal hard drive to the z170a’s internal HDD, which took about 20 hours.
It has great extensibilities: there are 3 free SATA for HHD and two PCIe slots.
Power Consumption
The only downside is that it consumes a lot more electricity. When testing in barebone, it drew only 10W. After putting everything together with additional HDDs, fans, and ethernet cable, the power metre jumped to 45W. I removed hard drives one by one to see where the bottleneck is.
- No HDD, 27W
- IronWolf alone, 32W, 5W increases.
- IronWolf + Seagate, 37W, another 5W increase.
- IronWolf + Seagate + Toshiba, 45W, 8W increase.
So I kept only IronWolf which is a 3TB NAS grade HDD.
I also tried tweaking the BIOS and Linux kernel to get to C-states but I felt it was over-engineering so I am happily settled down with 27W.
Footnotes
1 I record weightlifting to correct and improve my techniques.