NanoNAS

As I got my first feedback on thingiverse I want to inform everybody to be careful when you put the upper case over the external ports as this is the most fragile part. Designwise I didn´t found a workaround for this area as result it can happen if you push too much that the connections between the ports break off but with a liztle bit patience you can set iz in place as one piece.

FriendlyArm NanoPi M4V2 NAS

FriendlyArm recently updated the NanoPi M4 and added V2 in the name. In my opinion this is more a 1.1 but nowadays the product promotion works much better with general version step changes 😉

As I got the question the FriendlyArm NanoPi M4V2 should be fully compatible for this setup. The formfactor didn´t change. On their Website I found following changelog description

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=268​

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So you are good to go with the newer version but it would be helpful if you share your experience if you clone this setup with the new nanopi M4V2. Thanks…

say hello to the 4-bay NAS

two beers and 2 hours work done on modelling the 4-bay version. The overall height will increase for 21mm but now the case can host 4 2,5″ drives and get used of all SATA ports of the SATA hat… 

Please provide feedback if you print it out as I don´t have the time for getting it printed for a proof… THANKS a lot!

4-bay better than 3-bay?

I´m thinking about extending the NAS design as the SATA hat offers 4 SATA ports. So in the end you can choose by yourself if you want to use all ports or go with only 3 drives.

I will have to look into my messy FreeCAD files to find the right position for the extention…

New photos and measures

reprinted the top case as the first one was quite fast and a test. Excuse my bad printer settings this will be the next task to optimize the values.

The measures of the NAS are 134*129*89mm – it is quite compact for hosting 3 harddrives with 12TB net memory…

Why did I design a case for a Nanopi M4?

I had for long time a single bay synology but since the drive died a few years ago I didn´t use it anymore for storing files on long term as everything was in the nirvana at that time.

I looked into a 3-bay or more NAS with redundancy and realized that it starts at a high price point and entry level NAS are restricted to a manufacturer and their support in terms of firmwares or OS builds. On the other hand you can get nowadays good and convenient solutions but these are mostly based on x86 which consume a lot of energy.

So this year the nanopi M4 with the sata hat came out and I wanted to give it a try. I only realized one pain point and this is the missing case hosting the nanopi + extention board and the drives. I also looked for a low consumption NAS so I decided to go with this setup and OMV4. I want to support this setup and especially the OMV + nanopi M4 by adding herewith the design for a simple and easy to build case. There´s no challenge for installation…the OMV image is available for the nanopi M4 as well as the aditional modules and drives and now finally I´ll provide a compact case to host everything safely.