HOW TO... Create your own NAS drive using an SD card
Create your own NAS drive using an SD card
By Nik Rawlinson
What you need: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W; high-capacity microSD card; DietPi software Time required: Two hours
The price of memory cards is plummeting. You can pick up a 256GB SanDisk Ultra microSD card for just £19 (www.snipca.com/55636) – that's a lot of storage for relatively little money. There are plenty of ways to put it to good use – slip it into a digital camera and it'll hold thousands of photos. But for something more ambitious, why not combine it with a Raspberry Pi and the free DietPi operating system to create your own network-attached storage (NAS) drive?
Here, we’re going to use the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which measures just 30x65mm and includes a 1GHz processor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It costs £14.40 (www.snipca. com/55600) and runs on a microUSB connection. You may already have a suitable USB charger, but if not, the official 12.5W Raspberry Pi adapter costs £9 (www.snipca.com/55602).
1 Download DietPi
Visit www.dietpi.com and click Download at the top ( 1 in our screenshot below). Click ‘Raspberry Pi 2/3/4/Zero 2’ 2 , then the Download link to the right of ‘Download Image’ 3 .
While that’s downloading, download balenaEtcher, which you’ll use to copy DietPi to your memory card. Click the download link to the right of ‘Etcher for Windows (X86|X64) (Installer)’ at www.snipca.com/55597.
Finally, plug your SD card into your PC – which you can do directly if it has an SD card slot. If not, buy an external SD card reader, like Benfei’s 4-in-1 device (£7 from www.snipca.com/55637). Windows may ask you to decide how it should handle external storage devices – you can ignore this for now.