How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#1

Post by celticbadboy » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 12:43 PM UTC

How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server
jeremymorgan.com

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#2

Post by secure » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 12:58 PM UTC

I’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.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#3

Post by Nux » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:05 PM UTC

secure wrote: post #2

I’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.

Might be fun to do and the performance is not THAT bad.

Yeah, if you want to watch 100GB Bluray from it will suck arse, but it may be adequate for document storage for example.

Attach a printer to it and you also have a print server. This little setup could serve well an office or a household.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#4

Post by dazzawazza » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:11 PM UTC

secure wrote: post #2

I’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.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#5

Post by davidarkemp2 » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:21 PM UTC

This just basically tells you how to mount a disk and install samba. You could equally well apply these instructions to any debian-based system.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#6

Post by celticbadboy » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:25 PM UTC

davidarkemp2 wrote: post #5

This just basically tells you how to mount a disk and install samba. You could equally well apply these instructions to any debian-based system.

Here we go with that argument again.

The point of all these people doing "Raspberry Pi" articles with basic Linux stuff is to teach people who just bought a Pi and don't know how to use it. The overall point of this device is education.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#7

Post by Nursie » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:26 PM UTC

The 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 and scp is sloooooow as a result.

As a general point of cynicism (and that seems to be my mood today) - did nobody ever have a small, general purpose computer before the Raspberry Pi came along?

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#8

Post by celticbadboy » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:26 PM UTC

secure wrote: post #2

I’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'm sure it would be but I think it would teach folks about Samba and mounting drives, it just scratches the surface of Samba but might get someone interested in building a real server with it.

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#9

Post by AcessoNegado » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC

Would it be much different with other distributions folks are using on the Pi? I would think BSD/Unix variants would be different.

Also does Raspian support a lot of USB drives out of the box?

Re: How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server

#10

Post by Nursie » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 1:38 PM UTC

AcessoNegado wrote: post #9

Would it be much different with other distributions folks are using on the Pi? I would think BSD/Unix variants would be different. Also does Raspian support a lot of USB drives out of the box?

It's not going to be a lot different, no. Some of the details around mounting the drive may be slightly different, but only slightly, and samba's going to be the same whichever *nix you use.

For extra credit you could investigate running minidlna on it to expose your media to things like smart-tvs and playstations.

--edit-- On the external drives thing, most USB drive enclosures should just work (tm) with linux these days, however there used to be problems surrounding power-saving. This is due to them being designed around the way windows uses external enclosures, and linux not waking them the same way, or not realising they had gone to sleep or something, and many disk enclosures I used with older ARM debian boxes (4+ years back) had a habit of going to sleep and not waking up.

tl;dr - YMMV, best to stick to one that is known-good.