RasPi NAS build - Anyone?

[BrickedBox]

Hi All, I have found a couple of links for building a Raspberry Pi NAS.

I have a RasPi and nothing in mind to do with it. I also have some old 2.5" HDDs from laptops I have swapped out for SSDs. I have a powered USB hub and a VGA monitor Y-splitter arriving soon.

Our needs are very simple for a NAS, basically just a common storage area for music and this might seem to be a low cost approach.

I keep reading about speed, but as far as I can tell, the complaints about speed are at the initial copying to the new NAS storage, rather than end-user operating speed. We have Netflix and often the DSL would drop to 1.5MB/s but movies were still quite watchable, so not sure how important speed really is once a NAS is all up and running as storage.

Thoughts, helpful-comments and suggestion gratefully received.

 

[stevech]

I have an RPi. It would make a rather slow NAS!
My RPi uses SMB to access file shares on my LAN, including my small NAS.

But you're speaking of an RPi with a USB drive connected, I assume.

 

[aldo]

I probably shouldn't reply because I am quite new too and not too knowledgeable, but I do have a raspberry Pi B+ with the set up you describe.
Raspbian plus samba, RPI hooked to modem router via Lan, fixed internal IP for the raspberry Pi on both wifi (n, for hooking it to my tv) and ethernet, two usb 2.0 HDs (ntfs and FAT32, both external power) set as automount.
One thing which might help is using only ntfs drives, Fat32 does not support file permissions very well, which might prevent writing to the media via samba.
Ubuntu laptop, various android devices and an ipad for clients, accessing headless via ssh and samba.
Incidentally, if you preload raspbian on the sd card, you can set up everything headless via ssh, no need to connect it to a monitor, mouse and keyboard.

In general it works well and the Raspberry is a really nice RPI.
If we are talking mp3s you should be ok, or streaming videos from the internet. Video streaming from the HD probably less so.
You could also use it as a media player with an android app as remote control.
I read of somebody reencoding their whole video library based on the target device, which sounds like a pain.

Personally, I had in mind to access my tons of photographs to reorganize them, work with metadata and so on, while keeping a mirror backup with dejadup.
But speed is an issue, with jpgs of several megabytes and raw files even larger.

So I am moving to a router with USB3.0 and fast ethernet to use for direct access, while keeping the raspberry Pi for managing backups of the main drive at night. Still need to look into the details as for backing up things automatically from our different devices.
The thing is, the rasperry is usb 2.0 and lan/100 only, I understand there will never be an improvement under that aspect. They would need to come up with an entirely new chipset to manage faster interfaces.
But for streaming music I think it should be fine. Photos too if they are light or you are patient

 

[azazel1024]

It isn't even the 10/100 port that is the limitation, AFAIK. It just doesn't have the CPU ability to handle decent storage. I believe you'll be looking at a few MB/sec max performance (3-5MB/sec).

That is plenty fast enough if you want to stream a transcoded movie or three. Don't expect to do anything in the way of streaming raw blu-rays seamlessly or doing real backups (unless they are small or you don't mind them taking hours and hours). For music, sure, that'll work really well.

Just keep in mind, it is going to be slow. Plenty for streaming even scads of music, but back-ups will be slow. If you are talking about pre-loading the drives with MP3s and then all you need to do is backup the occasional album or something.

Aldo, get a real NAS. Seriously, you'll be much better off.

 

[theonlyski]

It isn't even the 10/100 port that is the limitation, AFAIK. It just doesn't have the CPU ability to handle decent storage. I believe you'll be looking at a few MB/sec max performance (3-5MB/sec).

They're releasing a new Pi today that has a quad core 900Mhz chip with a gig of ram. http://www.cnet.com/news/raspberry-pi-2-model-b-is-a-quad-core-upgrade-on-sale-today/

Not saying I would use it as a NAS, but it's gotta be much better than a B+ or so.

 

[azazel1024]

They're releasing a new Pi today that has a quad core 900Mhz chip with a gig of ram. http://www.cnet.com/news/raspberry-pi-2-model-b-is-a-quad-core-upgrade-on-sale-today/

Not saying I would use it as a NAS, but it's gotta be much better than a B+ or so.

Yeah I saw. Probably significantly better...but still a 10/100 port. I suspect with the improved performance, it can probably saturate its port, but even if you somehow added a gigabit adapter (say through one of the USB2 ports), I doubt you could get much more than 10MB/sec performance.

6x faster than extremely slow, is still not very fast. Though I suppose that does put it at least on par with a faster Pentium 3, so maybe it could push closer to USB2 speeds for storage.

PS Please note, it might be quad core and 900MHz, but they are still EXTREMELY simple cores, and unless there are major bus changes, the bus is very simple and USB2 driven for the whole thing (IE 480Mbps of bandwidth to share between everything, even if there are multiple ports, so at best you'd have to divide networking and storage performance in to that 480Mbps, then overhead, so maybe 160-180Mbps max each).

PPS I am very interested, for the same $35 you get a much more capable picocomputer. I'd say performance wise it is now in the "functional for basic slow NAS duties". Also very promising for things like home automation, lightweight webserver, etc.

 

[mtganzer]

They're releasing a new Pi today that has a quad core 900Mhz chip with a gig of ram. http://www.cnet.com/news/raspberry-pi-2-model-b-is-a-quad-core-upgrade-on-sale-today/

Not saying I would use it as a NAS, but it's gotta be much better than a B+ or so.

The Pi is I/O bound, not CPU bound, when it comes to using it as a NAS. The ethernet port shares the same bus as the USB 2.0 ports. I doubt that has changed in the Pi 2.

 

[azazel1024]

The Pi is I/O bound, not CPU bound, when it comes to using it as a NAS. The ethernet port shares the same bus as the USB 2.0 ports. I doubt that has changed in the Pi 2.

That little I have seen suggests that the PiII is still using HSIC connected to AMBA, which means 480Mbps before overhead for EVERYTHING I/O related on the thing. Figure 280Mbps after overhead (because USB2 sucks).

At least from what I have seen, the Pi Mark 1 is CPU bound as they seem to preforms at closer to 6-8MB/sec, not the ~11.4MB/sec that they would be if they were actually I/O bound (the limit of a 100Mbps ethernet port). So the Pi 2 should actually be I/O bound as a NAS.

 

[System Error Message]

The ARM A7 is 80-90% the performance of the ARM A9 according to ARM since it is geared more towards power efficiency. This means that a quad core ARM A7 at 900mhz is faster than those dual core premium routers and since the raspberry pi 2 will have windows 10 as an option it can be fast at SMB. The only problem i see which makes me not want to buy it is lack of gigabit ethernet and fast IO for things like usb3. If there was a gigabit ethernet or usb3 add on than it could be a viable option.

 

[azazel1024]

The ARM A7 is 80-90% the performance of the ARM A9 according to ARM since it is geared more towards power efficiency. This means that a quad core ARM A7 at 900mhz is faster than those dual core premium routers and since the raspberry pi 2 will have windows 10 as an option it can be fast at SMB. The only problem i see which makes me not want to buy it is lack of gigabit ethernet and fast IO for things like usb3. If there was a gigabit ethernet or usb3 add on than it could be a viable option.

I wouldn't call it an add-on, I'd all it part of the system I/O hanging right off AMBA.

As it is, even adding them wouldn't really speed anything up. The USB3 would be limited to USB2 speeds (because system bus is HSIC/USB2 based) and the gigabit ethernet adapter would also be limited to HSIC/USB2 speeds, which means one directional, about 280Mbps maximum. As it stands you can staturate the fast ethernet port full duplex...but it leaves little I/O bandwidth free for anything else at that point.

I suspect it is something that will be "fixed" at some point, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it being changed up to faster I/O anytime soon. It is a lot easier and cheaper to simply slap on more memory and a faster processor than it is to do things like rearchitect the system / I/O bus.

 

[System Error Message]

There are alternatives. I remember theres also a quad core ARM arduino with an ARM based controller.
http://www.udoo.org/features/
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardTre

 

[stevech]

I suspect that the Pi 2 has the same Ethernet via USB as the older ones. Slow.

I have an older one, and should get the Pi 2 next week.

Mine use SMB to access storage on my NAS.

Good for fooling with Python and the tk GUI for Python.

 

[thiggins]

This is a bit dated:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/32053-make-your-own-raspberry-pi-nas