Disk Overload?

People love to push their Raspberry Pi computers to the limit. Whether that involves overclocking them to ridiculous speeds, or setting up an over-the-top desktop or server rig, there is something about these tiny computers that makes us want to see just how far they can be pushed. Perhaps it is the relatively small price tag that makes these challenges so appealing. You might not want to void your warranty and risk frying your daily driver, but a Pi can be sacrificed for a sufficiently good cause (although many tears would be shed).

YouTuber HG Software is a big fan of testing the limits of Raspberry Pis, so he recently decided to build a storage server with as many hard disks as possible. This may not be as dangerous as pushing CPU voltages beyond safe levels, but a 10-disk server is pretty wild for a $50 computer all the same. As it turns out, this was not especially hard to achieve, but it did take a little bit of hacking to get everything working just right.

The storage server is built around a Raspberry Pi 5. A Geekworm X1010 PCIe FFC to Standard PCIe x4 Slot Expansion Board was then connected to the Raspberry Pi’s PCIe port. This board is powered by a standard ATX power supply, and it can also pass power along to the computer via pogo pins. Once installed, it provides a standard PCIe x4 slot. With that, HG Software was able to install a ten SATA disk expansion card.

Next up, Raspberry Pi OS was flashed to an NVMe SSD drive that was connected to the computer via an SSD to USB board. After verifying that the OS would boot normally with all of the hardware installed, a single disk was added to the expansion card.

Firing up this setup resulted in disappointment initially, as a number of error messages flashed by during the boot and the disk was not accessible. But after finding a quick config file hack just reported on by Jeff Geerling, everything was coming up roses. The disk was accessible from Raspberry Pi OS.

So the next step was to push it to the limit and install nine more drives, for a total of ten storage disks, plus an eleventh that is used as the boot drive. With the fix already applied, the computer booted right up this time with all of the drives and none of the problems.

To finish things off, HG Software installed the drives in a plastic tower case with fans and mounted all of the hardware to a piece of wood to keep things together. Finally, Storj was installed to handle access to the storage disks.

While everything worked, it was not exactly fast. When writing to all ten disks simultaneously, speeds ranged from 27.7 to 2.09 MiB/s. That is not something that would be acceptable for, say, a public web server, but for a home storage solution, it will do just fine. And since all drives are not being accessed at the same time in general, real-world speeds should be considerably better.

Has this build sparked any wild Raspberry Pi-powered ideas for you? We would love to be the first to know about them!