Radxa's latest iteration of its Penta SATA HAT has been retooled to work with the Raspberry Pi 5.
The Pi 5 includes a PCIe connector, which allows the SATA hat to interface directly via a JMB585 SATA to PCIe bridge, rather than relying on the older Dual/Quad SATA HAT's SATA-to-USB-to-PCIe setup.
Does the direct PCIe connection help? Yes.
Is the Pi 5 noticeably faster than the Pi 4 for NAS applications? Yes.
Is the Pi 5 + Penta SATA HAT the ultimate low-power NAS solution? Maybe.
It's more compelling than the Pi 4 was and could fit your use case—even accounting for the Pi 5's slightly higher price points.
I ran through the entire process of setting up and testing the Penta SATA HAT in today's video:
But I'll also summarize some of my key findings:
- If you want all the test data and notes, check out my GitHub issue testing the Radxa Penta SATA HAT on Pi 5. There's an exhaustive benchmarking process through which I discovered macOS Finder is terrible for network share performance.
- Having the HAT distribute 12V power to the drives and manage power delivery to the Pi 5's 5V rail via GPIO is very handy. You don't need two power supplies (one for HAT/drives and one for Pi) with this setup.
- I had to break off three little fins on the official Pi Active Cooler to make room for the 12V barrel plug on the underside of the HAT. It would be nice if Radxa revised the board to not require this modification.
- I tested an array of 4 Samsung QVO 8TB SSDs in RAID 0, and could get nearly 900 MB/sec at PCIe Gen 3 directly on the Pi.
- I was only able to write through Samba over the 1 Gbps built-in Ethernet connection around 96 MB/sec (with a 100 GB test folder) from my Mac — read speeds were consistently maxing it out at 122 MB/sec, and on Windows I could get 115 MB/sec write speeds.
- I installed openmediavault 7, which worked great with ZFS, but was missing standard RAID configuration options—possibly because I had separately installed
mdadm
in my testing? I would love to try TrueNAS Scale, but it sounds like iXsystems isn't interested in porting it to Arm. - ZFS in RAIDZ1 gave me lower network write speeds around 74 MB/sec from my Mac, and 108 MB/sec on my PC, but read speeds were still maxing out the network connection
- I installed a Pineberry Pi HatBRICK! Commander and HatNET! 2.5G for 2.5 Gbps networking, and it worked without issue, though it would be nice to find a better way to get things stacked up:
Using that setup, I could consistently get 230 MB/sec read speeds over the network, but writes were still bottlenecked around 100 MB/sec on my Mac. It's not easy to pin down the problem on my Mac, but on Windows 11, it was consistently giving me 150 MB/sec, so it's not the Pi's fault.
With the PCIe Gen 2 switch in the way, storage and networking are both downgraded to Gen 2 speeds, which results in the bottleneck preventing faster write speeds. You could get a little faster with RAID 0, since you wouldn't need to write parity data, but that's not recommended for most network storage use cases!
Item | Price |
---|---|
Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) | $80 |
Radxa Penta SATA HAT | $45 |
12V 5A Power Adapter | $10 |
32GB microSD Card | $12 |
TOTAL | $147 |
My conclusion? The Pi 5 + Penta SATA HAT is most useful for read-heavy environments, but works great for any basic NAS use case. All-in, spending $150 or less on a small, energy-efficient NAS (this setup used 6-8W at idle, and 10-16W under load) isn't the worst way to build DIY network storage.
I also really wish Raspberry Pi included 2.5 Gbps networking out of the box... the RP1 chip certainly has the bandwidth, but it seems like more was allocated to the DSI/CSI imaging pipeline and multiple USB 3.0/2.0 buses than networking, for this go-round.
Radxa will hopefully sell a case and fan control board at some point, to make this a more robust solution, but those aren't available currently.
Comments
A number of comments on YouTube suggested I test out a USB 3 2.5G Ethernet adapter. So I plugged in my Plugable 2.5G adapter, and tested transfer speeds with a 50 GB folder on Windows 11 and got:
See this comment on GitHub for all the details.
Try bonding all network interfaces
Do you really understand how 'bonding' works?
Jeff,
mdadm raid on OMV 7.x was moved to a plugin called openmediavault-md. Install it from the plugins tab.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. Ordered two of the boards and I’ll get some Pi 5s when I get back from travelling. I’ve been wanting to get into 3D modelling so working out a 3D printed case for this will be fun. Preferably something that I can screw an extra fan into and mount the usb ethernet to nicely too.
I'd love to see your case! This would be a fun appliance to put on my desk, but without a case, I'm worried when I mist my plants, I'll fry it. :)
Exactly why I am interested in this project. I need a simple 3D model to start with .... only need a printer, first!
Can one use mechanical disk with this setup as well?
In the video Jeff talks of this, stating that you would likely just need a beefier power supply that could deliver up to 10amps.
Note that I haven't tested it in that configuration though... not 100% sure if the HAT's power circuit could handle 8 or 10A, but it might.
It's a shame to spend more than a grand in SSDs to run them over an underpowered arm chip further bottlenecked by terrible networking, when you could spend 300$ on a intel board with 10GB networking, SFP+, more ram, more compute... etc. If you use spinning disks OTOH this might be an extremely cheap, fairly slow, NAS, but enough to store your media...
You are clearly missing the point. Sure, a GT3RS is the ideal track car, but you can have a lot of fun with an mildly updated MX5. The same analogy applies here.
I'm not sure that analogy holds.
Where did the ribbon cable come from? I got a standard IPEX cable that isn’t compatible with the smaller PCIE slot on the Pi5.
Ribbon cable comes with the board (kit) when you order the PI5 version. I ordered the board, so hope i will see it soon some day.
What about setting this up as a DAS?
Heart, hear. That would be interesting!
Still this build loses speed competition to your rig with NVME drives, doesn't it?
What would be easier to build a NAS case for, the X1011 or this? The shapes look more basic I believe.
This setup would be great if only I could find more than a reference to a NAS case in Radxa's wiki.
Raxda published their 3D model for a case here recently: https://grabcad.com/library/radxa-penta-sata-hat-nas-case-1
I broke it out into STL files and I plan on printing it off in a couple weeks when I have more time. It's been nearly a month since I ordered my SATA hat and the distributor still hasn't shipped it so it's cooled my rush.
Does anyone have Radxa's ear? These are not available on Amazon (where I would like to purchase).
Bought through AraceTech, got it today, ordered April 18th
I ordered on 9th of April and received the card and accessories on the 16th of May. After the expected delivery time of 7-10 days was exceeded I contacted Arace. They did not respond to my first email but on second contact they assured me the product was going to ship within the next 14 days.
The tracking information supplied was excellent.
I think AraceTech underestimated the volume of orders - especially due to Jeff's excellent PiNas how-to video.
I have been searching for months for availability on the Penta Sata Hat.
Hi, got by mistake the hat for the rock 4.
can't find the spec for the ribbon cable anywhere to connect to the pi 5. is it custom ?
It is a custom cable; I was hoping Radxa would sell the cable separately at some point, but I haven't seen it available yet. I would consider opening a new topic on the Radxa community forum: https://forum.radxa.com.
https://arace.tech
I can't post the link but if you search "penta" the cable is there.
It's out of stock atm but they sell it separately
If the max draw you saw was 16w, couldnt you use a lower amperage power supply than the 12v5a?
Technically, yes; though I like to have a little more provision to my PSUs since the immediate power draw can be a little spiky (only visible if you're looking with a scope), and many cheaper PSUs are better used well under their maximum rated output. I could probably get by with a 2-3A PSU on this build, but 4 or 5A makes me feel better.
Did you notice any USB brownouts while powering it from the SATA HAT? I'm waiting for my NAS drives to arrive, so I'm just sort of testing it with cast off hardware, and if I run the Pi+HAT (with one drive)+2.5" USB3 HDD off a 60w brick connected to the HAT, the HDD eventually starts suffering from the click of death, while the SATA drive seems fine. Meanwhile if I power it with the 27w Pi USB-C plug, both the SATA and USB drives are fine, so far. I assume the Radxa power delivery is hitting some kind of limit that's causing USB brownouts.
I saw someone else running theirs with both the pi power and the HAT power connected, but that always feels like risking backfeeding some bump/boost converter or other on one of the boards, and they're too expensive to want to risk that with.
I haven't tried it with anything plugged into USB at all... I generally use these things headless :(