The utility of a home NAS has changed drastically over the years. It has gone from the humble beginnings of simply providing storage, to being a multi-role home server. NAS servers can sometimes be powerful beasts, employed to run all manner of apps and services as well as continuing to serve heavy files to the home.

Single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi offer the alluring prospect of lower power consumption in a tiny, easy-to-deploy package. As such, this article is going to look at how a Pi can replicate some of the common workloads we are doing with a power-hungry NAS.

4 Docker applications

You can run most, if not all, NAS applications off a Raspberry Pi

Many, if not all, NAS operating systems these days give you the ability to run docker apps on your chunky server. In the case of systems like Unraid, it is the primary way apps are delivered via their community store. This is obviously a fantastic way to use all the additional resources and CPU power that your traditional NAS provides, but you can actually just run docker on your Raspberry Pi.

Doing so gives you access to a wealth of applications which are compact and easy to install as well as remove. Many common NAS applications will run simply fine on the little Pi, applications such as Pi-hole, WireGuard, or Bitwarden. Using your Raspberry Pi to run these common services can take the strain off your NAS or replace that duty altogether.

3 Home Assistant

Use a Pi to run this service 24/7 without the big energy bills of a NAS

NAS operating systems such as TrueNAS and Unraid give you the ability to run virtual machines. A common service deployed as a virtual machine is Home Assistant, a service which allows the meshing together and automation of differing smart home devices.

It is easy to install Home Assistant on your Raspberry Pi, installing it here instead of on a NAS makes lots of sense. You’ll want to have Home Assistant running 24/7 to monitor your devices and run automations. Running this service on a Pi will mean it can tick along nicely, without needing to burn a hole in your energy consumption.

2 Media Server

Let the Pi take care of your various entertainment needs

Self-hosting a media server is a popular use case for deploying a dedicated NAS. The Raspberry Pi can be used to create a media server very easily using popular services such as Plex and Jellyfin. If you don’t need to transcode anything, a Pi can handle it.

Creating a Raspberry Pi build with extra storage will allow you to self-host your media collection and share it internally or externally. While a Pi build might not be suitable for hosting huge, data-resilient libraries of media, it will do fine with a single additional drive.

If you are worried about having to transcode media, think about buying a dedicated streaming device such as the Nvidia Shield. The shield natively supports almost every video codec natively, so you’ll never need to convert it on the fly.

1 File sharing

You can set up a decent home file server using a Raspberry Pi

There is no doubt that a full-blown NAS is built with the intent of storing and sharing files from the get-go. Also, a NAS will generally give you some data redundancy if you have a system which will take multiple drives. Not all NAS devices have or need data resilience, and it's quite possible to grab a single bay NAS even today. Storing and sharing files is a basic operating system function which does not need much technical ability or resources to replicate everything.

The central feature of a NAS is to serve up files and a Raspberry Pi is perfectly capable of jumping into this role. Here you can go super basic and just have files stored based off your microSD card or, better still, grab a Raspberry Pi enclosure and a dedicated drive to store your files.

As this is probably a single drive system, you’ll want to ensure that anything important is backed up to the cloud or somewhere else on your network. Having a compact and low power file server based on the Pi will give you a perfectly usable home file sharing system and can certainly be cheaper and more flexible than buying an off-the shelf single bay NAS enclosure.

Raspberry Pi as a home server

Putting a single, complex NAS to work on your home network to do everything probably isn’t the best idea. While a dedicated NAS does seem like the ideal place to run all your applications and services in VMs and Docker containers, you are adding complexity and overhead to a single resource.

Moving some workloads off a NAS and onto a dedicated unit can help save power and, if you do it carefully, you can provide an auxiliary way to run services should one or the other device go down.

In a similar vein, the consensus these days is that you’ll need a NAS to serve up a bunch of files at home. In reality, you can quite easily serve files 24/7 off a cheap, low-power Raspberry Pi without the complexity and cost of a NAS, as long as you keep your expectations in check.