Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a Family Network Drive: 2TB WD Hard Drive Setup for Kids’ Macs

ACMer

3 months ago

“Create a 2TB Network Drive with Raspberry Pi for Your Family”

“Raspberry Pi + WD Hard Drive: Easy Network Storage for Kids’ Macs”

“Family File Sharing Made Easy: DIY Raspberry Pi Network Drive”

“Turn a Raspberry Pi into a 2TB Shared Hard Drive for Home”

“Save Space on Your Kids’ Macs with a Raspberry Pi Network Drive”

A couple of years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro for each of my two kids. My younger son’s laptop cost around $600 at the time and had only a 256GB SSD, so the storage often filled up. He constantly had to delete downloaded files and DMG installers. After using it for a while, the MBP’s ~/Caches directory also grew very large. Although you can temporarily clean it, it’s only a temporary fix.

I told my kids that they could move some files to cloud storage, like OneDrive or Google Drive, or I could connect a USB hard drive to their computers. OneDrive has a “files on-demand” mode where data is stored in the cloud without taking local space, which saves a lot of space, but the free storage is only 5GB. Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage shared across Gmail, Photos, and Drive.

My kids didn’t really like using a USB hard drive. First, it requires a power connection, and second, it needs a Type-C to USB adapter, which is inconvenient. They didn’t want to keep it plugged in all the time.

Then I thought of the Raspberry Pi at home. I could connect a portable hard drive to it and use file sharing to make all our home computers access it as a network drive (Map Network Drive). So, I dug through some drawers and found a 2TB Western Digital (WD) 3.5-inch hard drive, which requires an external enclosure. Conveniently, I had bought a hard drive enclosure a few months ago while tinkering with data.

Previously, this hard drive had been used as the D drive on an HP Z800 server.

The West Data Hard Drive that is used to install on the HPZ800 which takes at most 4 hard drives.

Adding a Network Drive: Mounting the Portable Hard Drive via SAMBA on Raspberry Pi

To make sure the hard drive had no bad sectors, I checked it with CrystalDiskInfo and also had ChatGPT review its health status — 2.3 years of power-on time, no bad sectors, everything is fine.

The CrystalDiskInfo shows that the Drive is still healthy.

Preparing to Mount the Hard Drive

The first step is to connect the hard drive to the Raspberry Pi via USB. It requires an external power supply. I found a socket that could barely fit two plugs in the small shoe cabinet: one for the 3.5-inch hard drive enclosure and the Raspberry Pi 4B.

The df confirms the USB hard drive has been connected and allocated/mounted.

Then I SSH into the Raspberry Pi and found the hard drive is formatted as NTFS, so it needs to be mounted:

mkdir /mnt/usb
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

Here, /mnt/usb is the target mount directory and needs to be created first.

If you want it to auto-mount on boot, just add a line to /etc/fstab:

UUID=<ID> /mnt/usb ntfs-3g defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0000,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10 0 0

<ID> is the hard drive’s UUID, which you can find with lsblk -f.

SAMBA Network Drive

The easiest way to share files is to install Samba:

sudo apt install -y samba

After installation, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and add:

[usb2share]
   path = /mnt/usb
   browseable = yes
   writable = yes
   guest ok = no
   create mask = 0777
   directory mask = 0777
   valid users = pi

Note: valid users can list multiple users separated by spaces or use @ for a group. The user must exist on the Linux system.

Set the SMB password:

sudo smbpasswd -a pi

Restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Map the Network Drive

On Windows, right-click “This PC” → “Map network drive” and enter the address:

\\192.168.IP_ADDRESS\usb2share

Enter the username and password, check “Remember my credentials,” and the network drive behaves like a local drive.

On a Mac, open Finder, press Command + K, add the server, and enter the IP Address of the Raspberry Pi, username, and password.

I created a folder for each of my two kids and my wife, so they can put their data in their own directories. The 2TB drive should last a while.

With this network drive, sharing data (movies, photos, etc.) is much easier. No more using WeChat, WhatsApp, or Google Drive — those are inconvenient for finding old files, and photos usually get compressed.

It’s great — the Raspberry Pi now has another use and is no longer just gathering dust.