Making a NAS with the Odroid HC2

Last a year I decided to upgrade my DIY USB NAS (you can read my journey so far here and here) and for this reason I bought an Odroid HC2.

This would be a big upgrade for me, as for the first time I would be able to connect my WD Red 3T via SATA and not via USB.

So, I bought one and let’s see below how it went…

My HC2

The hardware

Odroid C2 is a nice tiny board, made specifically in order to serve as a NAS.

Some of its key features are:

When I received it, I plugged in my WD Red on the SATA-3 port and then I started examining which OS I would use for my NAS.

The software

If you are a reader of this blog, you will have already understood that apart from being a geek, I am a control freak too. I need to know what exactly is going on with regards to the OS, processes etc..

Normally, I would install ArchlinuxARM, samba, etc, to create a 100% tailored OS for my needs. This time I decided to choose a different route and it proved to be the right choice..

Openmediavault

So I downloaded the OMV image for HC2, wrote it on the SD card and booted for the first time.

Openmediavault, is the exact opposite when compared to my 100% custom CLI based installations. It has a really nice web interface where you can easily configure your NAS in minutes and it has a LOT of features that will cover most of the average (and advanced..) user’s needs:

OMV screenshot

My first task was to upgrade the OS. In this forum post you can read about some issues I had when trying to do so plus how I solved them.

Next, I created the needed samba shares and started testing the new NAS.

Performance

Performance wise, the HC2/Openmediavault combo proved to be more than enough for my needs:

Read

dd if=/mnt/nas/music/testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 10.0303 s, 107 MB/s

Write

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/nas/music/testfile bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 10.9383 s, 98.2 MB/s

The HC2 as a Pi-hole box in parallel with OMV

In this post I explained how I used the Odroid C1+ in order to create a pihole box.

After finishing with the configuration of the NAS, I decided to make HC2 a Pi-hole box too so that I could get rid of the C1+.

In order to access the web interface I had to modify the web port of Lighttpd to 8080. The URL for the pi-hole admin interface became:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080/admin

Summary