How to DIY your own secured and high performance network storage (NAS) at an affordable price?

• No employee of a cloud service product could touch your NAS gear but you.
• Turn a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB Into a NAS for Whole-Home File Sharing = myCLOUD
• OPERATING SYSTEM - Raspberry Pi OS with desktop.
• RASPBERRY PI - Raspberry Pi motherboard model 4B 2GB. But you can use Raspberry Pi models 4B 4GB/8GB, 3A+, 3B, 3B+ instead.
• HARDDISK DOCKING STATION - Harddisk not included. You may fit a 3.5in SATA or 2.5in SATA on each slot. Max 16TB each drive. Total max storage capacity 32TB. The Harddisk Docking Station also comes with CLONE feature. Simply insert the master harddisk in the SOURCE slot and the slave harddisk in the TARGET slot, then press the CLONE button to clone.
• DIFFERENTIATION - you may combine the OpenVPN secured access from anywhere, myCLOUD FTP server and other functionalities on a single Raspberry Pi.

Getting started

I wanted to start this project several years ago. Back then I was considering to use my dual core hp laptop by scrapping the Windows 7 and installing the Ubuntu on it.

Things got procrastinated partly it's human nature and mostly things didn't fit. The laptop's Ethernet was 100BaseT so the throughput could go as much as 100Mbps and harddisks were bottlenecked by USB2.0.

The debut of Raspberry Pi 4 has changed the perspective. Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi, USB3.0, quad-core CPU at twice the clock speed of some NAS products. The form factor is comparable to a pack of cigarette, and together with a Dual Harddisk Docking Station of 32TB capacity, draw me back to the project.

There are also plenty more to explore. By adding OpenVPN, a FTP server, a BitTorrent server, a print server and an Access Point on the same Pi 4, wouldn't you be integrating these technologies flexibly with more success?

It's fun!!