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Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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How about a Raspberry Pi? I've got one (Raspberry Pi 400) running my Home Automation setup with a couple USB 3.0 ports. Was thinking there's gotta be some add-ons for Home Assistant to put some external storage to good use.
Don't need anything too fancy. Just looking for some on-site backup and maybe some media storage
For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you'll want something better.
Yeah, I guess I should have been clear that's part of what I was thinking (although to be honest I'm mostly a schmuck who pays for a few streaming services and uses that)
What exactly would be the main choking point? Horsepower of the Pi to take that stored file and stream it to the client?
So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn't be a problem.
Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There's some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn't a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn't need that much bandwidth.
What's going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you're connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.
There's also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don't remember why this was a problem, but it's just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to "full" computers.
IIRC raspberry pis aren’t great as big storage NAS due to limited io but like for a small amount of home storage more than adequate.
I think you can install OpenMediaVault on that, at least I used to run it on a Pi 3 and an USB drive. Then just run whatever docker container you wish to.
I've got 2 rPis - a pi5 running Home Assistant and a pi4 with a USB drive caddy acting as little more than a NAS (it also does all the downloading through radarr etc.. )
I find them perfectly adequate.
My gaming rig acts as my emby server as it's basically on all the time and it has a beefy gfx card that can handle transcoding.
You can use it as a smb server and mount it with your other devices. They have an official addon for it with samba in the name.