Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics and today we are connecting all your devices together so you can zoom data, photos, video, anything you want between them all. Today we set up a Raspberry Pi NAS, a NAS-berry, with a low-power draw, high reliability, and the capability to stay turned on for years. They really are the perfect device to create a maker level NAS, especially with the fully open source Open Media Vault software. Now, if you were to ask me how much a NAS can cost, I would ask you how long a piece of string is. However, this system we're going to build here will be a more fiscally friendly approach to building a NAS which doesn't skimp on any features.

A Network Attached Storage device, or NAS, is a method of data storage that enables numerous devices to access and share that stored data. It works the same to a file server, but it's intended for a home or workplace that wants the physical hardware close by. Typically, a NAS consists of one or more hard disks or any data storage mechanism that are linked to a network, frequently by using an ethernet cable. That cable is normally attached to a Wi-Fi router. When set up, it can be accessed by numerous network devices including computers, smartphones, and tablets, because of this direct link to the local router.

There are many further uses for a NAS. A NAS can be configured automatically to back up data from other devices on the network, providing a layer of data protection. It is comparable to cloud storage, but local storage is more reliable and is always accessible. Local storage can still have that ease of access that cloud storage has too. You can share that data outside the local Wi-Fi with a Raspberry Pi NAS by using port forwarding. By setting up a NAS on a Raspberry Pi using Open Media Vault, you can create a fully customizable and swell solution.

That knocks the demands of Omega out of the park on the table is everything you need to follow along with today's NAS-berry recipe. You will need a Raspberry Pi single board computer. Here I have a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with eight gigabytes of RAM. The extra RAM will allow the devices to handle more concurrent quests and better manage larger file transfers. You will need a microSD card, a 16 gigabyte is perfect for this. You will also need a USB data device, a hard drive, a SATA SSD or even a simple USB stick flash drive like I'm going to use today is perfect. You also need a Raspberry Pi power supply, an ethernet cable, a HDMI and finally you're going to need a desktop computer, a USB mouse and a keyboard.

Now let's prepare the microSD card. Use a computer and Raspberry Pi Imager download imager using the link I have in the description to flash a new microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS light 64-bit. While that is preheating, pull out your USB flash stick. It is crucial that your USB stick is formatted correctly if you do not use NTFS file system formatting you're not going to be able to access your data.

With both of these parts sorted, let's connect everything else. Connect the ethernet cable to the Raspberry Pi and to your router switch or modem. This NAS setup can also be done by using Wi-Fi if so desired. Check the full write-up linked in the article. Connect the USB stick to one of the USB 3.0 ports on the Raspberry Pi. USB 3.0 Port is easily identified by the blue internals of the USB connection. It is also the central USB connectors on the Raspberry Pi board. These connections operate at higher speeds than the other USB ports.

Next slide in your flashed microSD card. Connect up a micro HDMI to HDMI port to hook your Raspberry Pi into a monitor. Now connect a USB keyboard and mouse to another USB port on the Raspberry Pi.

Then power on your Raspberry Pi by plugging in the power supply. Some packages will need to be installed on your fresh version of Raspberry Pi light OS. This will allow the correct operation of our NAS system. As we're using a light version of Raspberry Pi OS, we're not going to see our friendly desktop and instead be provided with a mostly blue screen that we can use the arrow keys on our keyboard to navigate and the enter key to select options. It will ask you to configure what language you are utilizing and ask for a username and password to be created.

With that complete, we will now see a mostly black screen with some text written on it. As you can see here, it will first ask for the username and password that you just created and once you have supplied it, you will have direct access to the terminal command. So, we now need to type and enter three lines into this terminal. These you can find in the description: sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade, and sudo wget-0-https://correct.io/openmediavault | sudo bash. Type in enter y if ever prompted. This process will take less than 15 minutes and the final command is going to restart our Raspberry Pi.

Once the reboot has been completed, the end result will look like this. Note your IP address as we're going to need that in the next steps. Also note the default username which is admin and the default password which is openmediavault. From here, we can disconnect the monitor from the Raspberry Pi NAS system as we don't need it anymore.

We will now access our Raspberry Pi NAS remotely and configure it correctly. Open up any internet browser, Chrome or Safari are excellent choices, on your desktop computer which is connected to the local network. Type into the address bar the IP address that openmediavault had provided.

In my case, it's 192.168.1.45 and I need to fill out the default username and default passwords for Open Media Vault. That is admin and openmediavault, and we're in. Before going any further, let's change that default password to something more secure. Click on the little head emoji on the right of the screen and select change password. Make sure that this is private and more complicated than just raspberry. But for simplicity today, I'm going to show you everything and keep the password simple.

Now let's proceed to setting up our Open Media Vault as a NAS. Click on Network found on the left tab, then click on General. Change the hostname to something more appropriate like Raspberry Pi-Nas. Having done that, click save. You're going to see this yellow box pop up all the time and every time you do it, you're going to click apply. This will confirm our configuration changes.

With that complete, jump over to Users and click on Users. Here we're going to create a username and password that we're going to type in on our actual computer to access our NAS. Computer-1 and the password raspberry is perfectly fine. Having done that, we've created a user for our NAS system.

Now jump over to the left, click on Storage and go down to File Systems. Here we're going to select our USB device. Click on it right here and click on Save. Once again, click on that yellow box and here you can see we have successfully mounted our file system device.

Next, jump into Shared Folders. This is the folder we're going to access from our desktop computer. Give it an appropriate name, my Raspberry NAS is a perfect one. Then click on the file system that we mounted just before, then click save.

The next step is to provide some privileges for this shared folder. You're going to click on your device and then you're going to click up onto the privilege section. Here, approve read and write for all the options. Next, we're going to turn on SMB/CIFS, this the file transfer protocol. Click on that, enable it, and then click on save. Doing so will allow file transfer to occur across your local network using this NAS. Also, click on Shares in here, press create, click on enable, and then click on your my Raspberry NAS. Scroll down and simply press save and confirm that configuration.

If you've done all of these steps, you now have a fully functional NAS. If you have multiple hard drives connected, you're going to want to configure RAID, raid. Check the guide that I have written up for details on exactly how to do that. The simplest use of your new Raspberry Pi NAS system is just dropping a file onto the NAS and pulling it out from another computer. On the computer that you want to access your NAS from, open a file explorer (if you're using a Windows computer, finder if you're using a Mac computer, or file manager if you're using a Linux computer). Click on your network and then find your Raspberry Pi NAS right there. We can expand it, enter the username and password you created in Open Media Vault interface. For the user, in my case, the username I made was computer1 and the password was raspberry.

If you didn't format your data drive, this is going to say permission denied and not let you do anything. I found that out the hard way with this. Now, we can simply use it as any other folder. Here, I am copying a file into the NAS system. We can even drag across and then play videos directly from it. Check out my boy shredding some hurricane waves filmed by yours truly.

So, we could now access our data from another computer or we could even access it from our phone. Check it out, with a phone File Explorer application like File Commander we can click on local network and click the plus symbol to create a server. Fill out that form that pops up as you see here using the IP address from before, and just like that you have now got all your devices able to connect to a singular point. This is much better than trying to plug a USB stick into your phone.

If you have been following along, then big success, you now have a fully function Raspberry Pi NAS system. For where to now, you can add extra hard drives, add port forwarding to create a NAS that you can access and drop files in from outside of your local area network, and create automatic backups. I explain exactly how to do all of this in the full written up guide, so check it out there. I have linked it down there in the description.

And that's that, I am a full-time maker with great knowledge of linking up computers, and I'm always happy to help. Until next time stay cozy!