Mount the SSD drive inside the USB case then connect the case to the Orange Pi Zero. Connect a USB-to-Serial to the Serial Header on Orange Pi Zero board.

Watch a tutorial on how to do a file server with Raspberry PI3 to get aware of the steps necessary to implement on the Orange PI, which are basically:

Read the Network Lessons.

Read another tutorial on OPL Lan with Raspberry PI

Without getting into much details (there are good tutorials online) the following steps are necessary:

• Download Armbian and write the image to the Micro SD card.
• Using a terminal program like Putty (windows) or Screen (Linux) check that the machine is booting.
• On the serial terminal setup the wireless network to be able to access the machine later without the serial adapter using SSH.
• Install and configure DHCP server (link with good explanation)
• Format the SSD drive. I have used ext4 as a filesystem to be able to use iso images larger than 4GB. Some tutorials advise to install NTFS (ntfs-3g) support for Linux.
• Make SSD drive mountable on system startup (linkwith good explanation)
• Install and configure SAMBA Server
• Check that it is possible to accesse the file share from another computer

Install the DC-DC voltage converter and attach it to the bottom case using 3/8" hexagonal spacers (standoffs). Adjust the power supply to provide 5.0Volts

The connector was reused from a damaged cable. The Positive and Negative wires were soldered and then isolated with thermo-restringent tube.

Check twice if the output voltage on the DC-DC regulator is adjusted correctly (and thus providing 5.0Volts)

If everything looks fine perform a new test to verify that:

• The server is connecting to your wireless network
• The samba share is visible and writeable
• The DHCP can assign an IP network on the wired connection