Home Lab Project

Revamping a 1TB Hard Drive into a Raspberry Pi NAS with OpenMediaVault

With storage always becoming more important, I decided to repurpose a 1TB external hard drive into a network attached storage setup using a Raspberry Pi 4 and OpenMediaVault.

Setup process

I followed a guide from Pimylifeup.com to get the project moving, but ran into an issue when a reboot disabled the eth0 interface. That meant I had to stop, reflash the Raspberry Pi OS with a 64 bit headless install, and recover the setup before I could keep going.

What worked

Once the system was back on track, OpenMediaVault made the actual NAS setup pretty smooth. I was able to configure the storage, test it by backing up a local downloads folder, and verify that transfer speeds over ethernet were solid.

What I learned

One issue that came up later was that mapping the drive to multiple machines required creating additional users, which was a good reminder that usability details matter too. Overall, the project turned out to be a practical and worthwhile DIY build that added useful storage while giving me more experience with Linux style troubleshooting and networked systems.