Now I'm curious if you can make a NAS entirely made out of USB Sticks

"I apologize for how things look" (displays organized, clean office) 😆 Like you, a company I worked for previously used USB connections for data devices, although ours weren't exactly mission critical. I saw those things continue work through unintended weather intrusion, hydraulic oil spraying into a control cabinet, chemical immersion, all kinds of crazy stuff.. and I saw them lose connection in a dry, sealed cabinet for no discernible reason at all. Given the option I'd probably choose something better suited, but if you're running a home nas and need a bit of extra storage? Yeah, I'd hook up a USB drive without another thought. Interesting concept!

Those 2.5" drives takes little power, they can operate with 5V and 500mA So you can use a USB self-powered hub (remember, there's no USB switch) that will provide 500mA per port. I have one 2.5" drive that requires 12V but it's a 10,000 rpm drive (velociraptor) 5,400 rpm drives typically use 5V.

Obviously not nearly as USBified as this video, but I've been running my media server's storage drive via USB since day one. It originally started with the fact that my media server is a Mac mini, so it couldn't exactly fit the 8TB 3.5" SATA HDD I was using for storage, but I ended up keeping things connected via USB when I switched to a 2.5" SATA SSD. It's been running like a dream, I've never noticed any performance issues with streaming, and it was perfect for copying content from another PC when I was on dorm Wi-Fi and couldn't run a NAS.

Needs more cheap burning hot USB flash drives :D

A 2.5" HDD should totally work via USB only with no need for additional power. The only 2.5" mechanical drive I've ever needed additional power for was a WD Velociraptor, but those things are beasts.

I just love your videos, you try all the stuff we would love to try. It makes for amazing content. Keep up the good work 🎉🎉

Really cool how you edited off of the USB NAS, to give some real world non data insight into how it works. Its easy to see the bad numbers and vomletely write off usb any USB for a NAS, but i think this acurally convinced me to use USB adapters for a backup NAS.

Great stuff! I may have to break down and get a Zima board and experiment with it! Way too much fun! I do run a large backup for my NAS off a USB 3.0 enclosure and it works just fine, speed not that critical. Have it in a Docker container that just fires on demand. Thanks for the great content!

Great video man! I have often wondered if I could do this some older Sata drives from laptops I have in a drawer.

This answers a lot of my biases when it comes to using USB for NAS stuff. Thank you very much 😊

Great video ! I went down this path 6 months ago, Used a Morfine M9 has N100 CPU and 2.5g nic, but I used 5 x NVME drives 1 x internal 4 x USB3 enclosures with Truenas. Had the same issue with the serial numbers, had to get 4 differant chips set enclosures. transfer was a rock solid 280mbs. Issue I had was, as I like to power down every night on startup it would drop a drive now and again. Scraped it and bought a Asustor 6 ( 6 x NVME bays ) duel 2.5g nics with both pluged in get, over 500mbs. Tried Truenas on the Asustor but went back to the Asustor software more versitile for that machine. I run 2 x large Truenas servers also, so dont get me wrong, Truenas is a great piece of software. Roy

Congratulations on the quitting of the day job! Looking forward to future HH videos with your undivided attention on production and quality! Always love your content!

Thank you for posting this video. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great 👍 work. Yes 👏 you are a real KZfaq creator. Plus you are answering questions. For your KZfaq community. Plus I’m interested in the *(Zima Board) as well..

This is literally my setup with couple of differences. I use a passive cooled mini pc and a $25 double bay 2.5 inch Hdd enclosure ( only powered by USB ) . Only Debian is installed on EMMC Mini pc: - 2x usb3.2 - 2x usb 3.1 - internal NVME (limited to 1800 MB/s) and EMMC - micro sdCard - 1 gig LAN I'm using all except the micro sd. I bought the enclosure 2 days ago.Disk speeds are SSD: 380 mb/s HDD:100 mb/s . If you would like to pay more you can buy an enclosure with 10gbps , the pc supports it however all disks are limited to 100mb/s by LAN speed while using SMB. I'm very happy with it Forgot to mention the best part, system has a 10w CPU and uses less than 25w in total

I've been using my ODRIOD-C4 since late 2020 with SSD's over USB3. It has worked okay for low power and low shared storage.

Nice testing! I am still struggling to buy or not the ZimaBoard, and I think your review has put in another brick of consistency towards me buying it, maybe in a "2.0 version" having a bit of problems solved (the problem of PCIe cards with brackets which interfere with the connectors is an idiocy which I can't bear with!) Or, perhaps I need to get deeper information about the blade iteration of Zima... Thanks a lot!

I run the Sabrent USB 4 bay with 4 SSDs along with a 1L Lenovo i5-7500T (internal SSD and NVME) Ubuntu desktop. I share files via Samba, and access via SFTP / SSH. Works fine for my use. I don’t use RAID, just copy files across the SSDs manually when needed. All 4 SSDs show up separately. No problems. For the Sabrent 4 bay I just turn the fan off, with SSDs I really don’t need the cooling, no fan noise. SIMPLE ! 😊

I'm actually doing something like this. As I didn't too care about speed (just a place to ease the access of achived media and other documents in a mostly WiFi LAN), I have a thinkpad p50 working as LAN server, having 14 1T 2.5 SSDs in dual-in-one enclosure (each pair work as a two-way mirror Storage Pool) connected to the laptop via usb hubs and with external power. So far so good, I'm happy with it. BTW, I used USB sticks as storage for such a NAS before.

It was exciting and curious ! THANK YOU !

I'm actually planning to use a USB HDD enclosure with a mini PC to backup my main NAS, this was really helpful, thank you!

sabrent makes a 5 disk external raid enclosure version of that 2.5in dock that I use. No issues with it on debian (x86 dietpi) as RAID5 for NFS mount. Plan on buying more for sure.

Interesting video! This is literatlly my homelab setup lol but i use usb 2 but when using a raspberry pi there is no alternative to usb unfortunately

Nas with USB drives works great. I am running a truenas on a smallFF pc, with 6 8TB WD Mybooks(z1). It has been working perfectly fine now for about 4 years. One thing I noticed that seems to be very different from Sata is that the drives will actually go into spindown and remain off for the whole day unless it is being accessed. With Sata they always seem to spin back up randomly. When using USB enclosures you should make sure they are high quality and use USB UASP.

At the shop I worked at in the late 90s early 2000s when we would have cards dangling and wires running all over, we would say we were “living like shit”. When you were looking at everything and unwinding that keyboard it reminded me of those good times.

I think USB may work for simpler cases. I built desktop machine for use as NASes and VM serverss. I found the cost of running even low power desktops high in my area. I am replacing them with low power mini Pcs with USB SATA storage. My needs are very simple, backups off the originating system and light file sharing on a Gigabit network. The new Pi 5 or a Zima board would be idea for the server side. My skill level still needs the support of a GUI , so the minis do both serving and being a desktop Thanks for the great video.

With the popularity of mini PC's I would love to see videos on options to turn a powerful mini PC into a NAS using just about any interface other than USB3. Thunderbolt, USB4 are the obvious choices since most high end mini PCs have that built in but other m.2 adapter add in options such as Oculink would be nice! Also a real NAS has more than 2 hard drives. External enclosures with 5 to 8 bays are what the home -lab community are looking for. Since you are full time now you should have time to solicit vendors for the hardware to do these videos. Hope you appreciate the ideas!

Those enclosures are really cool; they give you the option to buy real NAS drives for backups. My usecase right now is just cold offsite backups, but in the future I may need hot data; then I can ”just” migrate those drives to a nas. That flexibility is nice!!

Sorry i got lost and im not sure if you mentioned that you are bottlenecked by the HDD speed/number in this test. You can't really test the full capacity of the setup in this way. Mind that the quality of the USB matters. Some cables are better than other unfortunately. Same goes for the networking cables. Loved it - really cool vid and you have put a lot of work in front of and behind the scenes to put it all together

Thank you for making this video. I've been contemplating the idea of doing something similar in attempt to build a pretty low-power NAS/Jellyfin Server for home. While it seems literally possible and functional, it's clear that many of the compromises just aren't worth it. It would be reckless to do this in an effort to save a few Watts at Idle.

Congrats on leaving your day job! *How* do you make your videomicro sound so good?

OOH...might be ZFS caching and overhead that made things squiffy...try it with OMV, see if that Sabrent drive thingy can be seen properly...and see if using BTRFS or EXT4 changes any of the reads/writes ALOT of interesting data there and build...pretty cool

I have been running a RasPi4 with two external USB 3.0 hard drives (WD 12 and 8 TB) for over two years. OS on microSD. Running Raspbian with MariaDB, Plex Server, Sonarr, NZBGet, etc. No issues serving media to KODI and Plex apps anywhere in the house.

XigmaNAS OS embedded (fork of FreeNAS) will load from flash into system memory, eliminating system writes to a drive except for configuration changes written to an archive. You should try that as well in future episode. Great solution for older of the shelf NASes with x86 which are long time unsupported by the vendor and run from internal flash on module (I use my with Qnap TS-469L)

Hardware Daddy, we missed you! ❤️

One thing about TrueNAS, you will need to copy a file larger than the RAM so that you aren't using the RAM Swap. I'd be interested to see if you get the same results with a 20-30Gb copy to and from.

New hardware ? New gift from Haven !

I was just thinking about doing this to convert my no longer portable laptop into a homlab for the uni work, so I think i'll pull ahead to the usb enclosures and powered hub.

I use a Seagate personal cloud which has 3tb hard drive plus I have 7 14 TB western digital external drives attached to it via a USB hub. This has worked well for many years now, it is cost effective and I have found no drawbacks at all. I should say I use all of these drives as distinct file locations and use them both for storage and streaming. I also have a Western digital cloud device but it balks at having more than one 14 TB attached.

One of the Sun Microsystems ZFS team's original party tricks was runnings ZFS on USB sticks. It's not a good idea, but it does work.

Well I've been hosted an orange pi zero with 2 hdd drives as usb for two years and I can definitely say it will work. It was capable to handle deluge with minidlna and stream 4k videos. So what else you need from such cheap hardware?

I built a True-NAS box using an Atom based industrial box. I started using a USB stick as the boot drive, with a terabyte 3.5 inch HDD. The USB stick kept dying, followed by the HDD. So I used a small SSD as the boot device, fixed the borked boot drive, but I lost another HDD For a stable build I swapped over to an ex-enterprise grade drive, less capacity, and it loved to almost continually recalibrate, however the system is at lease now stable. So you've kind of inspired me to hang a USB HDD off there to see how that fares, my board only has two SATA ports, so USB is almost my only other option (as both SATA's are in use, boot, and ex-enterprise drive)

at 4:40, what the little USB C to regular USB 3, does that mean you can plug and none power hungry USB C, thing in to a stand USB socket 3 and maybe also 2.0 or 1.0 versions too?

I like the opening. So optimistic

I'm kind if there using USB, I made a security video recorder using an Atom based industrial board. I partitioned off part of it's hard drive for network sharing, so a Windows based NAS. I then started hanging USB drives off it to use it as a centralised backup box. It's not fast, however backups usually are not, I start them and just walk away, it'll be done when it's done.

Just love you videos man, so it's ok to use usb Hubby but not recommended Point to be noted milord

Hi, I would be interested in a video about a simple file server set up. No bells or whistles or overly complex software.

could you technicly use readyboost or something similar to use usb as ram?

I think DAS is perfect when you are starting with a mini PC (and maybe you also already have an external drive that you hook up to it), and then later you want to extend your storage.

I have a Synology Ds218+ (2-bay ) with an eSATA 2-bay drive caddy, and a USB3.1 2-bay drive caddy. All 6 drives are readily available and work just fine.

OK, this was an interesting video, and I don't mean to diminish what you did here... but WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT HP ELITEDESK BEHIND YOU?? I just bought one of those (3400G, 16GB, 256GB SSD) to experiment with and am curious what you're doing with yours!! Or.. did I miss a video?

The orico multidrive enclosures pass through drives correctly, btw yottamaster is another good one

Currently I am using 2 WD 10tb drives in raid 1 with USB adapters and a sata sad for boot on minisforum b550 mini PC with Debian 12 with casaos and webmin no issues for now

If you ever test this again, maybe consider going with USB-Adapters that support UASP. I think one of yours did, but the other didnt, which is why you saw the correct serial no. on one drive, but not the other. As this was a mirror, you are limited to the slowest part of the chain.

the main thing I don't like about usb storage is that I think it has trouble with weird commands like blkdiscard and trim. I've heard there are ways to enable it though. I kind of wish you covered it in this video.

I've had a terramaster DAS connected to a raspberry pi for almost 2 years now and the USB connection was never a problem.

Anything can be turned into a NAS....When its hardware haven!!! :)

I run the Sabrent USB 4 bay with 4 SSDs along with a 1L Lenovo i5-7500T (internal SSD and NVME) Ubuntu desktop. I share files via Samba, and access via SFTP / SSHWorks fine for my use. I don’t use RAID, just copy files across the SSDs manually when needed. All 4 SSDs show up separately. No problems. For the Sabrent 4 bay I just turn the fan off, with SSDs I really don’t need the cooling, no fan noise. SIMPLE ! 😊

I've been running 2 wd USB 8tb my book USB drives to a raspberrypi. I run omv6 and Plex. Not pretty but I have not had any issues in the 2 years since setting this up. Is it the fastest? No but I play 4k content with no stuttering or frame drops. Plus I can view my content anywhere using openvpn to connect to my network.

you can get adapters that allow you to get more power over USB. they're called "extra power" cables. cost about $6 each and you can plug in the extra power into a battery bank, another USB slot, or a power adapter.

Saw the room and setup behind you and instantly thought Audio Engineer, then you said your previous job was doing Audio over IP almost instantly. Lmao.

I run a NAS (TrueNAS Scale) from a vm with a usb HDD pass-trough . TrueNAS doesn't like it (trows a warning), but otherwise runs OK for watching movies trough SMB share from my windows pc, as well as from a jellyfin in a container in truenas. Didn`t test as NFS share for vm storage, but this would be a struggle, so i`m not gonna try. Also i can give Truenas virtual disk from my ssd pool in proxmox to use as cache for pool to compensate for lack of RAM in truenas vm. Runs without much complains from me) Also - Great video, Thanks!

How does it handle failures, what happens if something disconnects or gets unplugged? With Ethernet or SAS I can unplug any single cable and it keeps running as if nothing happened. But with USB just wiggling a cable can disconnect a drive and then Linux gets confused, the drive can't be unmounted, and it's impossible to remount the drive at the same filesystem location. Only a reboot fixes it. Despite turning off all power saving, drives will just randomly disconnect on their own, also breaking the system and requiring a reboot. Even plugging a drive into a hub can cause a disconnection somewhere else

You don't feel like a real KZfaqr ?!. But you ARE!. Not quite sure how it could work is the most fun stuff and you do it well. Very well indeed. As for NAS, i USBboot RedPill into DSM 7.2 on a Xeon E3-1226 with 16GB Ram. In as week, will build a bigger one with E5-2690V3 12core, 32GB ECC RAM....

I've been using my odroid xu4 with usb3 hub and 2 3tb hdd and 2 sata ssd as my OMV NAS with docker running plex, and some other containers.

[10 years from now] "Sorry, guys! I'm still not an expert on USB3x and SATA, so bear with me as a stumble through this..."

I like your current layout, it feels natural and lived in. Overly clean or deliberate layouts feel corporate and boring.

I ran a custom nas over usb for years. Worked well for me.

My first nas was an old computer (Win2000). Use of USB drives happened a couple times over the years. Always an option to use USB drives if you have good backups elsewhere. They just are ugly and contribute to cable clutter

Using USB external drive is really bad idea if you are not an enemy of your own time... My first iteration of the home server was 6x4TB WD external, USB3 drives in a ZFS RAIDZ2 under Ubuntu server, and on an Intel Atom motherboard. The MoBo only had 2x USB3 ports, so I bought 2x4port USB3 hubs. I also had no significant issues with read or write speeds, but at least once a week one of the drives was not reachable in time by ZFS and therefore it degraded the array.... Then I had to reconnect the drives and restart the server (I know, it is not the correct way to do) and then manually resilver the array, which is a loooong time. Then, I got fed up and decided to do it properly. I bought a 2U, 8 bay rack mounted case, an Intel 4th gen MoBo, and a sedcond hand IBM 1015 HBA card. I reflashed it to IT mode, removed all drives to the caddys, installed it all, under Ubuntu server, and it works flawlessly ever since (I think, it is about 4-5 years now) The time has come to an upgrade, so I already bought a really cheap, chinese X99 board, with a Xeon PCU, and 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM, and will soon upgrade the system using TrueNAS for now.

You should have called this one "The Nasty #2 NAS" (get it?) . Tip my hat a little for Don's "Nasty NAS".

My wireless switch has USB ports for connecting printers and external drives to the network. I haven't gotten around to finding a drive that works with the switch's protocols. I just know that the drive I have doesn't work with it.

I've been running over USB almost 3 years now with OMV. 1st years used a laptop and a external buffollo hdd, Next upgraded to ORICO Docking dual 3.5" HDD using single ironwolf pro and then updated to a mini PC n5105, and now dual 4tb ironwolf with the same dock. Working great almost a year with no issue with current setup. Its very reliable.

Dude showing basically my setup...

I've always been a huge advocate of HDDs over USB as opposed to massive SATA arrays. I find it much more convenient, and swapping out hard drives is typically much easier. To say nothing about the more budget friendly nature of USB expansion as opposed to SATA expansion. And, at the end of the day, if you're not hitting it with huge loads, it should be more-or-less fine.

usb4 on the way bigger and better and more confusing on the way will make this project more better and attainable - i think the overriding concern with nas is to have 2 and also use fast networking and have the drives be nvme to match up with the network speed - lastly people really want to over provision ram - choosing truenas over unraid is a good choice - truenas is free

my "NAS" is a 5TB usb hard drive connected to an old laptop that's struggling to hold together (HP build quality) and it works great, however I can't seem to get syncthing to run efficiently in docker

do you daily drive that HP desktop on the desk?

what is the chipset of pcie network card?, is same as usb one?

I do wonder what this looks like In different configs, mostly is there a point where USB smooths out or plummets.. Maybe if you make the CPU so busy that it bottlenecks the USB.... 3 usb drives raid 5, mix match SATA and USB, 5 Drives (making sure to keep the SATA side on 1 card). I don't know that it's worth a video, sounds like a lot of work... Maybe just like an extreme case? 10 drives USB VS SATA? and the full 20 mixed case? I don't know that they make single card 10 drive SATA adapters. If you have an existing all ports in use SATA raid and add a USB Hot Spare does it actually slow things down by any metric? What if we're talking SATA SSD's? So many silly questions.

Sad thing is it's cheaper on there website for the ZimaBoard just saying 119.90 for it just seen what it was not 229.99 not Amazon great video I'm going to get one though 👍 like your videos brother

hey why does my routers usb not work and there isint a setting for it please help i appreciate it

My NAS is USB for the storage. It used to be a raspberry pi 4 so it used to be wireless and use USB power too

Next video: making a 1TB NAS with 1GB USB sticks

2.1 gbit is pretty efficient on a USB 2.5gbit adaptor, that's actually impressive. Remember TCP/IP networking itself has about a 1:8 ratio so 1/8th of your speed goes to TCP/IP overhead + ping

I thought about an external NAS NVME M.2 or SSD were cool until I realized the upfront price and it was much easier to build in place my PC with all the accouterments and have one power supply for now. My current chassis is a HAF XB EVO with tons of top load space and 4 drive bays. Just bought an ASUS ROG Strix Z790-A to have ((5) M.2's (4) in raid) and (4) bays for back up. I haven't worried about doing any audio or video yet. A 3070 next month should be fine. I7 or I9 I'm just not sure yet. I am not a gamer, I just thought I'd build something capable to run VMs or VCs with partitions and data holsters. My contempt is with wires this is why I am posting on here.

What you can say about xiaomi 10Gb router? I need router for home. I have NAS unraid on 3 SAS HDD. All over device on WiFi. Over price or cool device?

jesus pal!!! if your area is 'messy' you gonna hate my space xD

What's funny is I have used that very same sabrent external drive bay for a usb-based NAS (or DAS), and it never performed well. Also it doesn't restore from power loss. I right now have some 8 bay USB-3 DAS that has a hardware switch so it boots back on. I have 4 18tb hdds using btrfs for a mirrored setup. Works really well and is surprisingly fast for my needs. (Even my Plex metadata database isn't horrible on it)

I use usb for Plex. No nas just my computer and it streamed great even 3k miles away. All blu ray content over 60tb of drives. Now I’m moving everything to SSD and going to experiment with a 16 usb hub on a mini computer.

for a sec I thought you meant running it entirely on the usb microcontroller or something like that lmao

I personally have abbbouuut 270 TB of storage, some 70% of it is through USB. Primarily it's a Syba 8-Bay USB 3.0, 5x 4-bay Sabrent 3.0, and a few external WD Easystore drives. They all connect up to my main homeserver (Windows 10 Pro, 5900X, 128GB of oLOY [yes, that's Yolo spelled backwards, I don't know why they named their company that] RAM, Asus X370 Pro) Internally, it has 11 3.5" drives, 3 connect to the motherboard, 8 connect to an LSI 9211-8i. And 5 SATA SSDs ranging from 512GB to 4TB, mostly 1TB. Also, 2.5gbe i225 card on a 1x slot, 7 port USB host card on a 1x slot, and an... Nvidia Quadro T600... on a 1x slot (vertically-mounted 16x to 1x riser cable with PCI-E connector, effectively making a "power connector-less card require a PCIE 6-pin [1x slots support a maximum of 25 watts. PCIE 16x slots support up to 75 in high-power mode and 25 in low-power mode.]" Toss in a Marvell 9230 controller card (that is 2x but I carved the end out of my 1x slot to fit...), supports FIS for eSATA (for another 4-bay enclosure, theoretically it supports 40 total ESATA drives on a 500Mb/s PCIE link) and that's the 1x cards. And, of course, a Mellanox Connectx-2 for a 10Gb connection to my primary computer on another floor because this one is loud AF. (I know, right?) Then... oh yeah, a rather pedestrian 1TB ADATA 8200Pro for a boot drive in the M.2 slot and 2 Crucial P3 4TB drives in a Hyper M2 card with PCI bifurcation enabled. Between them I have: a Windows Storage Spaces, A WIndows software RAID, a Marvell HyperDuo hardware RAID, and SSD acceleration in the form of PrimoCache for the first RAIDs. (Yes, that's a software cache for a Windows software RAID and Storage Spaces on NTFS. It's worked for 8 years and it's incredibly fast. Don't judge me. I promise it's backed up.) And with aaaaalllllllllllllllll that stuff you want to know how it runs? Great! It can run for 45 days with no issues whatsoever. Until something happens like the UEFI messing up bifurcation (oops, there goes your VM storage) and something as simple as Windows or UEFI/BIOS updates take an eon because the: motherboard has a screen, 2.5GB card has a boot screen, the Mellanox card has a screen, the LSI card has a screen, and the Marvell card has a boot screen resulting in a thirteen minute boot time. If you turn off CSM, it doesn't start. If you turn on fast boot, it boot loops. If you move the boot order to prioritize the Windows Boot Manager (i.e ADATA) you just get a black screen forever. Somewhat ironically, with a total of 147 USB targets... USB storage works fine, day in, day out. Then again, I don't edit off this machine. I just copy it and work on it locally and export it over the network. I have not had any luck with USB networking, though. I tried 3 brands of 2.5Gb USB adapters (all Realtek chips) and never saw over 60MBps no matter the driver, configuration, energy-efficient Ethernet (EEE), etc.) They all negotiated to 2.5Gb but the speed just wasn't there. Gigabit USB adapters worked at the rated speed but what's the point when the onboard port is already gigabit? 6:28: is also how Windows Storage Spaces works. Many multi-bay USB devices and SATA HBA cards only show up as one serial number and device ID which completely breaks Storage Spaces. 7:30: 2.5" drives are designed to run off USB 2.0 ports, meaning 6 watts (.5 amps x 12 volts). They'll happily run off the 10.8 watts USB 3.0 ports (.9 amps x 12 volts), assuming they're plugged directly into a port and not an unpowered hub. [Most 2.5" drives are spec'd for 4 watts peak.] 14:05 USB 3.0 is 5Gb/s theoretical but 8:10 encoding results in a max of 3840Mb/s, with that being very close to the expected real-world speed.

OMG this video is gonna be great

I thought why is he blurring this from this pc and only then realised that it's my camera cutout😂 time for bed

It'd be interesting to see how SSDs would squew the crystaldisk figures

I just clicked on the video and didn't watch it yet, but my NAS has been all USB drives for the next few years, mostly for yolo reasons.

0:46 Can't wait for USB CPUs!

This is cursed and I love it!

usb into nas, i await the day a calculator gets turned into a nas

Thanks❤