An excellent, cheap plan if you've never set up samba etc. before. To those rolling their eyes at a "toy" solution (and it's better than that), when you _do_ need a bit more performance and more discs I'd highly recommend one of these http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-micr... which HP have been practically giving away for years (£89 after cashback!) - a bit larger & faster than a Pi, 1GiB RAM, four hot-swap drive bays and gigabit ethernet.
How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#22I've done something similar with netatalk and avahi. Since I can use the drive with Time Machine on OSX. Like a cheap Time Capsule.
I'm using netatalk and avahi too on my Raspberry Pi. It work's great as a home storage server and I'm fine with the speed, cause I don't intend to be a hosting company ;-)
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#23I’d say: don’t. The performance you will be getting is horrible. Ethernet is connected via USB on the Raspberry Pi, so while via Ethernet, you can achieve about 90 Mbit/s, that speed drops to ≈ 40 Mbit/s once you access a USB hard disk drive. This is without any kind of encryption.
Works very well for me, I can stream music and cartoons on all my devices.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#24 To those always replying to raspberry articles that it can be done with other setups, and that it's nothing new, I think you're missing the point:
All those tutorials show that a single very cheap and well designed piece of open hardware can be very versatile and that everything we tend to see as magic is just a one page how-to long.
I'm in my forties, an since I have had my first walkman I wanted to get inside the machine, to drive it dwork my, from the bowels. I have seen iPods, but can you ssh in an iPod? I have seen media centers, but can you bulk rename files or script it?
Now with my raspberry I finally got my dream for real, and I can even ssh to it from my phone when I'm away.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#25I’d say: don’t. The performance you will be getting is horrible. Ethernet is connected via USB on the Raspberry Pi, so while via Ethernet, you can achieve about 90 Mbit/s, that speed drops to ≈ 40 Mbit/s once you access a USB hard disk drive. This is without any kind of encryption.
That's still better than the 54Mb/s wireless connection (never practically above 20Mb/s) my old laptop that I'm streaming content to has. For the large part, it should work.
It won't be a high performance server, but then, it's a Raspberry Pi.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#26The Pi is great and all, but after running setups like these for many years (ARM server + USB enclosure), I came to the conclusion you're better off with some other solution if you're transferring even a few GB around the place. Of course most of those solutions would be a lot more expensive. The HP Microserver is my current solution, with zfs. And even that could be a lot better as there's no hardware crypto support…
> did nobody ever have a small, general purpose computer before the Raspberry Pi came along?
I'm not sure I follow - does anything that runs http://archlinuxarm.org/ count? I have four Pogoplugs at home. For about the last year or so, two of them run a web server and an rsync backup server. The other two are for learning/experimenting.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#27Interesting, so there are like a billion blog entries "How to build a Raspberry Pi Server" where X is "file", "print", "media", "security", "email", "web", "DNS", Etc.
They are really just how to configure a Linux box to serve that function, except the new hawtness is the Raspberry Pi. One would assume people would get it by now that its just another Linux server so anything you can do with a Linux server you can do with this.
What I like about this is that folks are willing to jump into these sorts of projects with a Pi. (go go DevOps!) When they wouldn't for some reason with an "expensive" computer. It is a lot of fun and there is lots of information out there to guide you.
As for this particular example the original LinkSys ARM based file server was way ahead of the game :-). It suffers from the same problems (there is a lot of unreliability built into the equation) but it spawned a lot of copy cats and its at least as useful as putting a disk on your wireless access point to serve up tunes.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#28Interesting, so there are like a billion blog entries "How to build a Raspberry Pi Server" where X is "file", "print", "media", "security", "email", "web", "DNS", Etc. They are really just how to configure a Linux box to serve that function, except the new hawtness is the Raspberry Pi. One would assume people would get it by now that its just another Linux server so anything you can do with a Linux server you can do…
Yep, interesting how price point and form factor twist people's state of mind.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#29I’d say: don’t. The performance you will be getting is horrible. Ethernet is connected via USB on the Raspberry Pi, so while via Ethernet, you can achieve about 90 Mbit/s, that speed drops to ≈ 40 Mbit/s once you access a USB hard disk drive. This is without any kind of encryption.
I'd say: DO! If you are trying to learn how to do these sorts of things but as with everything Pi, don't get your hopes up about speed. Once you are comfortable you can move on to a better dedicated setup.
Why not build it on older, unused hardware, then. It's not going to help to have to go through all the trouble of getting something going on ARM only to have to start over on x86, for example.
Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say: DO! If you are trying to learn how to do these sorts of things but as with everything Pi, don't get your hopes up about speed. Once you are comfortable you can move on to a better dedicated setup.
Why not build it on older, unused hardware, then. It's not going to help to have to go through all the trouble of getting something going on ARM only to have to start over on x86, for example.
Of course! If you've got older hardware do it on that.
The audience for Pi are youngsters who want to play. They don't have an office full of legacy x86, PPC, Mips hardware to play around with.
A tutorial like this is a great place for a youngster to start playing around.