Convert a Slice into portable NAS! Is it possible?

    I'm new to this forum and I couldn't find much about this device anymore! I got it through Kickstarter, like most people I assume, but mine got obsolete since we've had an Android box for streaming movies and series. But now I got the idea to convert this thing into a portable NAS unit if that is possible.
    My device is on LibreELEC 8.0.2 at this moment and still has the CM1 module in it, the storage it holds is a WD Blue 500gb SSD. Since I'm expecting a Pi 5 8gb soon, I'm not feeling about upgrading it to CM3, the Pi 5 will be a NAS project as well.

    Anybody that has an idea I can pull this off or perhaps did it themselves before?

    The easiest way would be if you keep running LE on the Slice and use it's Samba server. OFC that's not really a full-fledged NAS but you can share the data on your HDD.

    An alternative is to install any RPi0/1 compatible Linux/NAS system and add the dtblob.bin from LE to the boot partition - then Ethernet should work fine, too.

    so long,

    Hias

    IMHO wait until the RPi5 bits arrive then pull the drive out and connect to the new(er) RPi5 based NAS device. As much as I like the Slice box it's slow and dated and having the drive connected locally to the new stuff will just be easier.

    Quote from HiassofT

    The easiest way would be if you keep running LE on the Slice and use it's Samba server. OFC that's not really a full-fledged NAS but you can share the data on your HDD.

    An alternative is to install any RPi0/1 compatible Linux/NAS system and add the dtblob.bin from LE to the boot partition - then Ethernet should work fine, too.

    so long,

    Hias

    I seem to get somewhere by flashing the "Buster" build to the Slice and add the bcm2835 files including the dt-blob.bin files to the boot and the slice.dtbo file to the overlays folder. The drive showed up on the network that way and I managed to log in to it and did the sudo command to update and upgrade, then ran into a usrmerge issue that it wasn't merged, fixed that with a command as well and now it seems to be installing OMV on it.

    Quote from chewitt

    IMHO wait until the RPi5 bits arrive then pull the drive out and connect to the new(er) RPi5 based NAS device. As much as I like the Slice box it's slow and dated and having the drive connected locally to the new stuff will just be easier.

    I have a 2tb spinner for the RPi5 ready, so this Slice is a good practice and I seem to get somewhere right now. I basically combined files from an OpenElec into a Pi Buster-lite build.

    I ran into the limitations of the CM1, which isn't 64bit, so I got myself an small upgrade to work on the little NAS project.

    CM3

    At the moment I'm installing everything and hope to get further than a failed OMV install.

    Quote from chewitt

    It's a while since I shipped my Slice to another LE dev, but CM3 was a nice bump over CM1.

    To bad, I just made during the whole process a 16 page long manual how you convert your Slice into a NAS! It might not be as fast as a ready out of the box NAS, but it's good enough for me!