[shameless self promotion]
Building A Pi Based NAS(No longer maintained. See EOLing My Guides)
[/shameless self promotion]
Like everyone else, I'd suggest a 4B or Pi5. The zero[w] is single core and very limited RAM. The zero2W is quad core but has the same amount of RAM.
That said, my current home buitl NAS is based on a 1GB RAM CM4 lite, an ASM1184e PCIe packet switch, 3 x ASM1062 PCIex1 SATA cards and a bunch of SATA drives. All stuffed into an ATX PC case and powered from an ATX PSU.
As for partition/file system size limits, FAT32 tops out at 16TB (but, seriously, don't do this) and ext4 at 1EiB on 64bit system, 16TB on 32bit.*
Given the way an OS is installed on a Pi (raw image written to a raw device replacing all of it's contents) and on general principles I strongly suggest keeping the OS and the "archive" data on separate physical devices.
Unless you have a pressing need not to (e.g. you need to physically connect the data drive to a Windows box) I also strongly suggest using ext4 or another Linux native filesystem. Clients using on of the usual suspects for access (sshfs, sftp, SMB, NFS, ...) don't know and don't care what the file system in use on the server is.
One last thing (for now), no Pi has support for Wake on LAN. If you want that, you'll need additional hardware.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4
Building A Pi Based NAS(No longer maintained. See EOLing My Guides)
[/shameless self promotion]
Like everyone else, I'd suggest a 4B or Pi5. The zero[w] is single core and very limited RAM. The zero2W is quad core but has the same amount of RAM.
That said, my current home buitl NAS is based on a 1GB RAM CM4 lite, an ASM1184e PCIe packet switch, 3 x ASM1062 PCIex1 SATA cards and a bunch of SATA drives. All stuffed into an ATX PC case and powered from an ATX PSU.
As for partition/file system size limits, FAT32 tops out at 16TB (but, seriously, don't do this) and ext4 at 1EiB on 64bit system, 16TB on 32bit.*
Given the way an OS is installed on a Pi (raw image written to a raw device replacing all of it's contents) and on general principles I strongly suggest keeping the OS and the "archive" data on separate physical devices.
Unless you have a pressing need not to (e.g. you need to physically connect the data drive to a Windows box) I also strongly suggest using ext4 or another Linux native filesystem. Clients using on of the usual suspects for access (sshfs, sftp, SMB, NFS, ...) don't know and don't care what the file system in use on the server is.
One last thing (for now), no Pi has support for Wake on LAN. If you want that, you'll need additional hardware.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Thu Jan 08, 2026 8:06 pm