Building the fastest Raspberry Pi NAS, with SATA RAID
Since the day I received a pre-production Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and IO Board, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express cards with the Pi, and documenting everything I've learned.
The first card I tested after completing my initial review was the IO Crest 4-port SATA card pictured with my homegrown Pi NAS setup below:
But it's been a long time testing, as I wanted to get a feel for how the Raspberry Pi handled a variety of storage situations, including single hard drives and SSD and RAID arrays built with mdadm.
I also wanted to measure thermal performance and energy efficiency, since the end goal is to build a compact Raspberry-Pi based NAS that is competitive with any other budget NAS on the market.