Raspberry Pi NAS

Recently I’ve been having some data management issues. I have an external 1TB HDD and an internal 256 GB SSD in my laptop and my mom has a multitude of external HDD’s (3-5) and we have tons of flash drives and ugg… It’s as if a bomb went off inside our data and scattered across 13+ storage media. To solve this issue we need a NAS. NAS stands for network attached storage and it’s basically an drive connected to the internet that can be accessed wirelessly or remotely by clients. I followed a YouTube tutorial by Tinkernut to install all of the dependencies for this NAS such as NTFS 3G and Samba. I got everything hooked up and connected and guess what? It worked! It worked, but not very well. I was only seeing speeds of up to 2 or 3 MB/s something was the limiting factor. It could have been the software, could have been the network (though unlikely, we have 75/75 internet) it could have been the USB 2.0 port or the lack of processing power on the part of the Pi. If I had to take a gander I would say that it was mainly the 700 Mhz Pi Processor in conjunction w/ the whopping 256 MB of RAM that did me in. Even i I did get it to work, I still want to add many more drives and connect them in RAID. I am currently planning a real NAS build w/ 16GB + RAM and a decent processor. To that I’m going to add 4 or 6 3TB HDD’s in RAID. Even though the Pi NAS was a failure in my book, it was a good learning experience and I had fun tinkering around w/ it. This project will have to be put on the shelf until the $$$ rolls in to build a good, useable NAS.

-Ben