Building a Raspberry Pi NAS with a Whopping 72TB of Local Storage

If we’re to believe all of the marketing and advertising, cloud-based storage is a no-brainer, right? Well, let’s unpack that. Cloud storage requires a subscription and transfers are limited by your internet speed (and any caps imposed by your ISP). It also forces you to rely on the security of the cloud service to protect your data, which isn’t always a comfortable arrangement. For those reasons, you may want to consider a more traditional solution: a local NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. HG Software built his own Raspberry Pi-based NAS with a whopping 72TB of storage.

This is practical because storage is dirt cheap these days. Prices will vary, but $10 per terabyte of storage isn’t difficult at all to find. Even after adding in the rest of the hardware a project like this requires, it doesn’t take long to come out ahead when compared to the price of cloud storage—you can likely cross that threshold within two or three months. Cloud storage prices are currently around $5-10 per month for each terabyte, so you can do the math on that for yourself.

In this case, HG Software used six SATA hard disk drives, each with a capacity of 12TB. That comes out to a total of 72TB, which is an absolutely massive amount of space. Even the video editors reading this would struggle to fill that up.

To make all of that storage accessible on his local network, HG Software needed a device onto which to mount the storage. He chose a Raspberry Pi 5 for the job. If you’ve only tinkered with single-board computers like Raspberry Pis, you might think that they must rely on the boot SD card for storage. But that isn’t true and, in fact, hard drives are preferable when the system is going to do a lot of reading and writing, as one would expect of a NAS.

HG Software just needed a way to connect the hard disks to his Raspberry Pi. A Geekworm X1009 SATA Shield handles that and has five SATA ports. The sixth drive connects via a USB adapter and is the system’s primary drive. Power for the drives comes from an ATX power supply and the Raspberry Pi receives its power from a standard USB-C wall wart.

Finally, to make all of that storage accessible, HG Software configured the Raspberry Pi as a Storj storage node. That acts a lot like cloud storage, but with the user’s own hardware. Now HG Software has all the storage he’ll need for a long time without having to pay for space on cloud servers.