For years, I’ve had this itch to build a NAS. Not for any sensible reason but just because it sounds cool to have one. The problem? I could never find a safe, reliable spot to keep the hardware running 24/7 without worrying about it getting unplugged, knocked over, or something else.
Then in 2020, during the lockdown when I had way too much free time and not nearly enough stuff to do, I bought a Raspberry Pi. And I actually did get a basic NAS working on it. But that experiment came with some hard-learned lessons about reliability:
- USB drives don’t love 24/7 duty — they heat up, the controller starts acting weird, and sometimes the Pi just silently disconnects them.
- Old hard drives from dead laptops are not gold — one of mine spun up like a champ but had a knack of dying on me randomly. Sometimes it spun back up with all my data there, sometimes it didn’t.
- Wi‑Fi + Wi‑Fi = bottleneck city — when both the Pi and my laptop were on wireless, transfer speeds were hilariously bad.
So that setup eventually went back into the “cool experiment, maybe later” pile.
Fast forward to last week. Out of nowhere, I got this sudden burst of motivation. This was it. The Raspberry Pi was finally going to earn its keep. This time I did it properly: I installed copyparty for a dead-simple HTTP file share, set up Samba for proper SMB/CIFS network shares, and plugged the Pi directly into my router via Ethernet.
For mounting, I went full DIY sysadmin and stuck both the Pi and the external SSD behind my monitor with double-sided tape. This solves two problems at once:
- Physical security — no “helpful” family member or pet moving it to plug in their phone charger.
- Cable sanity — I could tie all the cables whenever I wanted to.
The storage is now an SSD (no more spinning rust), which means low latency, higher IOPS, and no sleep-wake delays when accessing files after a while.
To make it even more useful, I spun up a WireGuard VPN on my cloud VM. The idea is simple: tunnel all my Pi traffic through the VM so I can access my NAS from anywhere without punching questionable holes in my home network.
Sure, this was not the “plug-and-play” NAS most people imagine. It was more like “plug, configure, tape, troubleshoot, curse at ISP, then finally use.” But honestly? Worth it. Now I have a shared, high-speed storage setup when I’m at home, and thanks to WireGuard, I can pull up my files from anywhere else too.