Raspberry Pi

[max2]

Has anyone used one of these ?

How easy is it to turn one into a portable wifi/wireless (local only) ssd or hard drive battery powered?

 

[bobcomer]

Has anyone used one of these ?

How easy is it to turn one into a portable wifi/wireless (local only) ssd or hard drive battery powered?

I have, but not the same uses as you are looking for. We use it as a display device for PLC based data. The "disk" is just an SD card.

It's frustratingly slow for most things, but if you know linux, you can probably get it to do what you want.

 

[mfram]

I'm using a Pi 4 model B with a GPS board attached as a stratum 0 time server. Not a terribly quick CPU, but can be used for specialized tasks with the right attachment. You need to be familiar with Linux to really use one of these.

 

[splifingate]

Has anyone used one of these ?

How easy is it to turn one into a portable wifi/wireless (local only) ssd or hard drive battery powered?

I use my 4b regularly for PiHole duties (and chip-flashing duties when the need arises).

Mine is non-mobile, so I can't speak for anything other than that.

 

[sevoneone]

There is a big community around the Raspberry Pi. A little Googling and you will almost certainly find someone that has done a project similar to most things you would want to do.

The Pi 4 was a big leap forward when it came out as boards are available with 1, 2, 4 or even 8 GB of RAM, have USB 3, and the Ethernet adapter is on a PCI-E lane. On older Pis the Ethernet ran off the USB 2.0 bus and was much slower.

That said, the wifi is not great in my experience and should only be used as a convenience/light duty. Even though the Pi 4 is 802.11ac capable, mine can't connect to 5GHz unless it has line of sight to the access point. And on 2.4Ghz it almost always falls back to 802.11n. Not the best case scenario for a wireless storage device. There are lots of people that use them as a light-weight NAS using the Ethernet connection though.

 

[ToniCH]

There is a big community around the Raspberry Pi. A little Googling and you will almost certainly find someone that has done a project similar to most things you would want to do.

The Pi 4 was a big leap forward when it came out as boards are available with 1, 2, 4 or even 8 GB of RAM, have USB 3, and the Ethernet adapter is on a PCI-E lane. On older Pis the Ethernet ran off the USB 2.0 bus and was much slower.

That said, the wifi is not great in my experience and should only be used as a convenience/light duty. Even though the Pi 4 is 802.11ac capable, mine can't connect to 5GHz unless it has line of sight to the access point. And on 2.4Ghz it almost always falls back to 802.11n. Not the best case scenario for a wireless storage device. There are lots of people that use them as a light-weight NAS using the Ethernet connection though.

If the wifi is important its best to use USB-wifi -dongle with a proper antenna. Big improvement.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I use my RPi 4 as a NAS, with four HDDs attached and serving SMB, NFS and APFS. My wired network is 1 Gbit (i.e. about 100 Mbytes/sec) and I can regularly exchange files to and from the various drives at up to the full network speed. IOW, the bottleneck is my network, not my RPi. Internally, I can move files from drive to drive at up to 130 Mbytes/sec.

I really don't see why people are using high-speed RAID drives with SSDs, when the network can't support the traffic.

I manage the whole affair with Webmin.

It also acts as my Plexmediaserver.

I also have a RPi 400, on which I am typing this. Its wireless access is certainly improved over the 4.

 

[ozaz]

I use my RPi 4 as a NAS, with four HDDs attached and serving SMB, NFS and APFS. My wired network is 1 Gbit (i.e. about 100 Mbytes/sec) and I can regularly exchange files to and from the various drives at up to the full network speed. IOW, the bottleneck is my network, not my RPi. Internally, I can move files from drive to drive at up to 130 Mbytes/sec.

I really don't see why people are using high-speed RAID drives with SSDs, when the network can't support the traffic.

I manage the whole affair with Webmin.

It also acts as my Plexmediaserver.

I also have a RPi 400, on which I am typing this. Its wireless access is certainly improved over the 4.

My 10 year old Synology NAS will stop receiving security updates next year and I'm wondering whether to get another Synology or switch to the DIY route....

How are you attaching the HDDs to the Raspberry Pi?
Have you done some monitoring of overall power consumption (for the Pi and the HDDs combined)?

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

My 10 year old Synology NAS will stop receiving security updates next year and I'm wondering whether to get another Synology or switch to the DIY route....

How are you attaching the HDDs to the Raspberry Pi?
Have you done some monitoring of overall power consumption (for the Pi and the HDDs combined)?

I have a four-port USB 3 hub which attaches the storage HDDs to the RPi. The boot drive is a Samsung T3 SSD which connects to the other USB 3 port.
I don't generally monitor the drives' power consumption, as they are set to go to sleep when not being used.
I use Gkrellm to monitor the RPi overall, including Temperature, CPU use and frequency, HDD IO and Network IO.

 

[unclemiltie]

I use a Pi 3 as a PBX in my business. It runs a pre-configured version of Debian with the Asterisk PBX software (RasPBX)

I have one incoming Voip trunk from Twilio and have 4 DIDs with 3 handsets and 8 extensions and for a while used a Obi 200 to make an analog line for my alarm system.

It runs great, I haven't updated the software for ~3 years and the only time I have to reboot is when I have a power failaure.

 

[unclemiltie]

I use my RPi 4 as a NAS, with four HDDs attached and serving SMB, NFS and APFS. My wired network is 1 Gbit (i.e. about 100 Mbytes/sec) and I can regularly exchange files to and from the various drives at up to the full network speed. IOW, the bottleneck is my network, not my RPi. Internally, I can move files from drive to drive at up to 130 Mbytes/sec.

I really don't see why people are using high-speed RAID drives with SSDs, when the network can't support the traffic.

I manage the whole affair with Webmin.

It also acts as my Plexmediaserver.

I also have a RPi 400, on which I am typing this. Its wireless access is certainly improved over the 4.

Does this work with Time Machine? I'm trying to find an alternative to my (aging) time capsule using a newer mesh based network and this sounds interesting, especially since I have a couple of Pi 3's hanging around that I'm not using anymore.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

Does this work with Time Machine? I'm trying to find an alternative to my (aging) time capsule using a newer mesh based network and this sounds interesting, especially since I have a couple of Pi 3's hanging around that I'm not using anymore.

I believe so.

There are some example lines in /etc/netatalk/afp.conf --

; [My Time Machine Volume]
; path = /path/to/backup
; time machine = yes

Edit the lines to suit.
I am currently trying it.

Addendum Some hours later.
Apparently there is some problem with TimeMachine on Sonoma when you are logged in to iCloud.
I have currently logged out of iCloud, and am running a backup. I am halfway through.
More to come.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I believe so.

There are some example lines in /etc/netatalk/afp.conf --

; [My Time Machine Volume]
; path = /path/to/backup
; time machine = yes

Edit the lines to suit.
I am currently trying it.

Addendum Some hours later.
Apparently there is some problem with TimeMachine on Sonoma when you are logged in to iCloud.
I have currently logged out of iCloud, and am running a backup. I am halfway through.
More to come.

Well, that worked quite nicely.
It took 5 hours to do the first, full backup, and has now done a second, hourly, incremental one.

Don't forget, you will need to install netatalk on your RPi with --

sudo apt install netatalk

and then configure it in /etc/netatalk/afp.conf.

It's all pretty well self-evident. If netatalk doesn't start up automatically you may need to reboot.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I have been playing with my Raspberry Pi 5 and RPi OS Bookworm and Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur.

If you only want the default software, Bookworm for the RPi 5 is good, but it's a pain if you want to run something not standard, like Plank, Gkrellm, MEGAsync and the like.

However, it is very, very fast, so much so that running of a spinning platter HDD is acceptably fast.

Compiling a 150 pp Latex document on the RPi 5 takes about the same time as compiling it on my iMac.

Also, the USB 3 ports have been upgraded, so that I can read and write at up to 400 MB/S to/from a SSD.

 

[weckart]

Well, that worked quite nicely.
It took 5 hours to do the first, full backup, and has now done a second, hourly, incremental one.

Don't forget, you will need to install netatalk on your RPi with --

sudo apt install netatalk

and then configure it in /etc/netatalk/afp.conf.

It's all pretty well self-evident. If netatalk doesn't start up automatically you may need to reboot.

I used to use netatalk for TM backups with my Macs but got fed up having to recompile it everytime there was an Apple or major Linux update. Has its stability and compatibility improved recently?

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I used to use netatalk for TM backups with my Macs but got fed up having to recompile it everytime there was an Apple or major Linux update. Has its stability and compatibility improved recently?

I have never had to recompile netatalk on my RPi. I simply install it using 'apt'.
However, I have been testing it on a drive set up with Sonoma, and Sonoma, TimeMachine and iCloud don't get on well together currently.

 

[weckart]

I have never had to recompile netatalk on my RPi. I simply install it using 'apt'.
However, I have been testing it on a drive set up with Sonoma, and Sonoma, TimeMachine and iCloud don't get on well together currently.

Well, it's some improvement. It was only ever available as source code when I used it but it still seems to be as fragile as it ever was.

The other issue is that AFP is deprecated and has been for years. Has Samba improved in terms of finding network shares? Still surprised to see netatalk knocking around.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I have made tests on the various networking protocols.
Samba works fastest with a Windows client.
NFS works fastest with a Linux client.
AFP works fastest with a Mac client.

That's why I have all three protocols installed and configured on my RPi server.
Samba and NFS shares are managed via Webmin.
There used to be a Netatalk client for Webmin but it disappeared years ago, but it is a simple enough matter to edit the sample configuration that is supplied.

 

[ozaz]

To those who use RPi as a NAS / file server: what OS do you use on the RPi?

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

To those who use RPi as a NAS / file server: what OS do you use on the RPi?

Just the normal RPi OS Bullseye, managed with Webmin.
As mentioned above, I turn on Samba, NFS and AFP via Netatalk.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

Update on my use of the Raspberry Pi.

I was able to acquire, since the previous post, a RPi 5.

I now have three RPi's in use --

1. RPi 4 as a File and Media server using Plex Media Server. Adequate for most video files.
2. RPi 400 as a stand-alone headless command-line-only file server to replace my WD My Cloud 4GB file server. Cheaper than the WD My Cloud, with better performance.
3. RPi 5 as a Desktop PC (currently writing this)

The first two are running bog-standard RPi Bullseye. The RPi 5 is running Ubuntu Mate 23.10.

I use Webmin to manage the two 4's server settings.

Getting Ubuntu Mate running on a RPi 5 is currently a small challenge. The downloadable image is only 22.04 and won't run the RPi 5. I had to run it up on a RPi 4, then upgrade the distribution to 23.10 and install gldriver-test before it would boot up on the 5. However, once that is done it is extremely fast. It boots up faster than either my iMac or my Intel desktop pc, and loads applications very quickly. For example, it loads LibreOffice in about 2 seconds, compared to about 6 on my iMac.

All computers are running off SSDs.

Working on a long document using LibreOffice is faster and more reliable than working on the same document using MS Word under Windows.

Compiling a long document in LaTeX is slightly slower than under Ubuntu on the PC, slightly faster than on the iMac, and about 3 times faster than under Windows.

If you are going to run a Raspberry Pi 5, it is important to use fast, high-quality drives. I get the best, most reliable, performance from the SanDisk Extreme Pro V30 (Black) SD cards and the Samsung T-series SSDs.

As of the time of writing, Ubuntu Mate 24.04 is not released, and Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 has problems installing onto many drives (SSD and SD Cards). Stick with 23.10 for the time being.