Edit: This is no longer in use. I have moved to TrueNAS on a Proxmox system

This is a project I have taken on, in order to learn some skills in Linux, as well as obtain CLI and NAS setup experience.

The PiNAS is used to store photos and documents, and is only accessible on my network. If I need to access it when I am remote, I utilize a VPN I setup to access my network.

While connected directly to my wifi network I was able to see speeds of 15-20mb/s, which I find satisfactory as I don’t plan on dumping large files frequently. I have yet to test it while connected remotely on VPN, but I suspect my speeds will be bottlenecked by the VPN and will be lesser.

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The next step I took for the NAS project is remotely accessing it via a file explorer. It was never intended to just be a local storage device, I wanted something I could access anywhere while I was out.

Currently I am using VPN to create a tunnel for my traffic to go through and end up at my home, and I have setup CIFS through OpenMediaVault to allow me to browse files remotely through the file browser of my choice.

For security I have opted to only allow my user account to access the Share, and have enabled drive encryption. My next goal is end to end encryption.

Though the speeds are a little slow at 2Mb/s, it is enough to have storage truly wherever I need. I suspect my VPN is the bottleneck here, but more than likely I will either be on a hotspot or bad wifi while using the VPN so I dont think its cause for concern.