NAS Build Idea

Steve,

I love the Pi, though I've only been playing with mine for about a month. One thing I've noticed is that it's quite slow, at least in comparison to the average workstation. And using USB as the I/O channel seems like a very slow choice as well. If you plan to use a Pi-based NAS as a target for background, over-the-network backups (particularly if a slow Internet connection is bottlenecking the data anyway), that might work. But I don't think the Pi is a suitable platform to base a general-purpose NAS on if you hope to get even mediocre performance from it.

I don't mean to sound surly, and I'd truly love to be shown how wrong I am if I'm just ignorantly blathering nonsense.

The Fit PC3 from Tiny Green PC looks like it could be an interesting NAS platform that wouldn't break the bank. It's not so different from using the Pi in terms of the DIY-ness of the project. They're both complete, stand-alone computers that you can plug drives into. The Fit PC3 is just more ... fit for the purpose. :-)

--Jeff

Needs to connect with gigabit ethernet to the home network.

Are you needing gigabit speed?  or just to connect to a gigabit network?

The RPi only offers 10/100 speed.  

The RPi doesn't have SATA, so I'm assuming you'd connect your HDD's using USB (2.0),

but that isn't ideal because ethernet contends with USB for throughput on the RPi.

Steve,

Me again. I don't know whether it's cool to post links to other blogs here, but with apologies to Ben, check out Hack a Day's "Build a file server inside an old external optical drive enclosure" post, where the author looks like he's doing something very similar to what you're asking about.

--Jeff

This will be connecting to a gigabit network so might as well have the same on the NAS if possible. If the RPi is too slow and can't connect SATA to have multiple HDD's then something else will have to do. The Fit PC3 looks perfect for size and performance but not for the price in this project. For that price might as well go with a polished system like a Drobo. What I'm looking for ultimately is a NAS that is like the Drobo Mini and the Drobo 5n. If the Drobo Mini had gigabit ethernet it'd be perfect.

Personally, I would use an older full-sized PC with Linux for a NAS.

Unless there's a reason it needs to be small, not sure why I'd use the Pi.