A Four-Drive Raspberry Pi NAS That Doubles as Its Own Access Point
A Raspberry Pi 5 NAS with four NVMe drives that runs its own isolated WiFi network and serves files over an HTTPS web portal.
SynqBox is a network-attached storage box built on a Raspberry Pi 5 with four NVMe drives. What makes it more than a plain NAS is that it runs its own WiFi access point and shares files through a secure web portal, so the whole thing is self-contained. You can connect straight to it without going through your home router at all.
Its own network, not just a share on yours
The design choice that gives SynqBox its character is that it hosts an isolated WiFi network on the 10.10.10.x subnet rather than only sitting on the existing LAN. hostapd runs the access point, dnsmasq handles DHCP and DNS for clients that join, and the Pi shares internet from its Ethernet connection out to the WiFi side. So a device can associate with the SynqBox SSID directly and reach both storage and the internet through it.
That self-contained quality is the point. The box does not depend on your router's configuration to be reachable. It is its own little island with its own address space, which makes it genuinely portable between environments. You can still reach it over Ethernet on the main LAN when you want to, so it works both as a standalone unit and as a normal network citizen.
Storage and the web portal
The hardware is a Pi 5 with an NVMe HAT carrying four 2TB Samsung 990 PRO drives, fed by a 27W-plus USB-C supply because four NVMe drives are not shy about power. The drives auto-mount to named paths for different purposes, Unity projects, game storage, a Mac backup volume, with a slot left for a fourth, and the config is honest that the APFS Mac drive has limited support on Linux, which is the kind of caveat worth writing down before it surprises you.
Files are served through FileBrowser behind an nginx HTTPS reverse proxy, so access to the storage happens over an encrypted web portal rather than a raw file share. A firewall sits in front of the whole thing. The combination of an isolated subnet, HTTPS, and a firewall means the box is not just convenient but reasonably locked down.
The takeaway
Building a NAS that carries its own access point changes what it is. It stops being a device that depends on your network and becomes an appliance that provides one. Letting the Pi run hostapd and dnsmasq and share its wired connection out to WiFi turns a storage box into something you can drop into any environment and reach directly. Pairing that with an HTTPS portal and a firewall keeps the convenience from costing you security, which is the balance any homelab storage project is really trying to strike.
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