As I waved goodbye to my Synology Diskstation (on loan for review), I moved my stuff back to a Raspberry Pi-based NAS. Perhaps the “move back” isn’t the best term for starting everything from scratch with the Argon Eon case, but it’s not my first Raspberry Pi NAS – so it felt back like going back to the roots. In my review of the enclosure, I discovered an internal USB port – which seems perfect for the next upgrade: boot from USB.
New guts
While I was troubleshooting Super6C and my unfortunate problems with the NVMe boot – I acquired a handy tool – a £17 USB-A to NVMe/SATA adapter. It’s a small stick that does what’s on the box. Importantly, it fits neatly inside my Argon Eon enclosure. To host the file system on USB/SSD I needed a donor drive.
I had a couple of SATA SSD purchased for my Pironman and DeskPi cases. As my automation servers were moved to DeskPi Super6C Cluster – they have been not in use ever since. I found a very handy tool: DiskInternals Linux reader to save my stuff from EXT4/EXT3 formatted drives on Windows without actually powering the boards on.
The plan is to add a 256GB M.2 SATA SSD as a system drive, to spare the SD card the hard work and prevent it from an early death. I also found a 2.5″ mechanical HDD which may not be the fastest but will serve well as 1.5TB Plex/Jellyfish storage. I’ll use the remaining USB 3.0 ports at the back for that. I already have SATA to USB adapters for these drives in my possession, I just need to dig out the actual disk shield.
The installation took seconds. The USB stick fits nicely in place, so I moved to the next step. Both drives were formatted to NTFS on Windows. That’s not an issue as the moving boot to SSD will sort that out, and I can always re-format these in OMV.
Booth from USB
I followed my Boot from the USB guide for Raspberry Pi. Initially, I was not able to use raspi-config tools to run the boot configuration, so I had to refrain from the old method and update the EEPROM manually.
I used rpi-clone to copy the card’s partition on the SSD and power off my machine. At this stage make sure you have a backup of your drives – just in case things go sideways keep the SD card intact until you are sure that everything is working fine.
Troubles
Almost everything went ok – drives were accessible but I could not load the OMV interface. At first, I had issues with DNS – a quick nslookup 10.0.0.100 revealed issues with my router not finding the server. As reboots of all machines involved didn’t help much (it found the server, and allowed for SSH but didn’t fix the web UI issue.
OMV web UI not loading
After some googling, nginx felt like the most likely candidate to cause issues. A quick status check confirmed that my web server (nginx based) isn’t running as for some reason, nginx is not able to find a directory to store log files.
I re-created the folder and then file:
sudo mkdir nginx sudo touch error.log
and restarted the nginx service
sudo systemctl restart nginx
And just like that, my instance was ready for action!
Plex on OMV and more
Lastly, I had to re-configure Plex. I quickly removed the container, less quickly transferred way too many gigs of data between the drives and I was able to re-deploy Plex with my new drive as a volume that stores the media.
You’ll need a path to your media folder, which OMV exposes neatly in the Shared Folder section – just copy that path, and bind it to your local container folder structure and you are set to go.
Final thoughts
It was relatively simple (if not for the weird nginx issue). I can now sleep more calmly knowing that my Argon Eon is less prone to micro SD card corruption and potential data loss. I know that hardcore users will shout at me for using Raspberry Pi as a NAS but if I’m honest over nearly 5 years of storage, not a single bite was lost. I have an entire article dedicated to the differences between Synology Diskstation and Argon Eon setup – check it out! I do promise to get something a little more robust once I outgrow my current storage. It will be sooner rather than later – but I’ll think about it once I cross this bridge. Got comments? This is the Reddit thread to share it.
