How to Turn a Raspberry Pi Into a NAS for Whole-Home File Sharing

 

 

A Raspberry Pi with all the trimmings: Obviously, you'll need a Raspberry Pi for this project, along with the requisite accessories: a power supply, a microSD card, and a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor for the initial setup. Any of the recent-model Pis should work for this project, and you can read more about the other accessories in our guide to getting started with the Raspberry Pi. 

A hard drive (or two, or three): Unless you're sharing just a few files, your microSD card probably isn't enough storage for a NAS. You'll need some drives to fill up with your movies, music, or other files you want to share among devices. A standard external drive will do the trick in most cases, though

 you may need one that plugs into the wall separately—or a powered USB hub—since the Pi may not be able to supply enough power to all your drives. If you want a cleaner setup, you can use an internal drive designed for network attached storage, too, but that would require a case.