running a single-board-computer as a NAS at home - which system to use?

hello dear linux-experts - good day,


I've been musing bout the question of using a single-board-computer (sbc). I might be able to put a single board computer to good use around the home, and so far I'm predicting I'm going to need at least half a dozen of them! Sounds like a few fun weekends ahead...
Does anyone know if there is the ability/opportunity to use a single board computer to run a small NAS operating system (and connect it up to a few USB hard drives)? Or is this not a good use-case, perhaps because a SATA connection is needed?
The other idea I had was to run samba Server on a single board computer as a back-end (and of course use another single board computer for a front-end) - does anyone know if that would be possible?

some musings: As far as the front-end, purely from a speed POV and not hardware/driver capabilities POV - the network speed will likely might be the bottleneck. But speed does not matter - i do not need a high-speed system here.

Depending on which software we use to render our streaming media, it may not even use the local storage to "cache" the streamed data. It might stream to an area in RAM and then be retrieved from there. We can also do things like NFS mounting, in which case it will render directly from the NAS drive(s). Would USB be too slow on the backend... probably? Again, depends on how we ve encoded, bitrates, what else will be using the drives at the same time, etc.
USB drives make for nice, cheap, decent backup (but of course not mission critical data - RAID does that) on a NAS setup, because they're big and cheap and nobody cares that they're relatively slow.


The question is: which system should i take: i think i want to use a powerful Single board computer - (SBC)
- which system is the most powerful today... with a little powerconsumption....

i know alittle the following systems

- pine64.com
- banana pi
- orange pi
- http://forum.odroid.com/ developed by http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php


and yes i allready have studied the page here: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...oard_computers

love to hear from you

greetings

My view, is the biggest downfall with any of the SBC's I have looked at or played with, is when your dealing with USB storage, they are all on USB 2.0. I see the networking as less of the bottleneck.

I would think the Orange or Banana PI's, which (if I remember correctly), both have SATA connectors. You might consider some sort of write too drive, if you need to write quite a bit. (or put the USB drives on a faster system and then pull data from them, via the SBC's)

hello dear Linuxuser42 many many thanks for sharing your ideas.

well speed does not matter - i think that usb 2 does thejobe here.

BTW this following one comes with USB 3
- http://forum.odroid.com/ developed by http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

greetings

Originally Posted by sayhello_to_the_world hello dear linux-experts - good day, I've been musing bout the question of using a single-board-computer (sbc). I might be able to put a single board computer to good use around the home, and so far I'm predicting I'm going to need at least half a dozen of them! Sounds like a few fun weekends ahead... Does anyone know if there is the ability/opportunity to use a single board computer to run a small NAS operating system (and connect it up to a few USB hard drives)? Or is this not a good use-case, perhaps because a SATA connection is needed? The other idea I had was to run samba Server on a single board computer as a back-end (and of course use another single board computer for a front-end) - does anyone know if that would be possible?

Since it's running Linux, and Linux supports running NFS, Samba, FTP, and SSH (ALL of which can do networked file systems), the answer is obvious, isn't it?

some musings: As far as the front-end, purely from a speed POV and not hardware/driver capabilities POV - the network speed will likely might be the bottleneck. But speed does not matter - i do not need a high-speed system here.

No, as said, your drive connectivity will be ONE bottleneck, the other will be processing speed of the devices themselves.

Depending on which software we use to render our streaming media, it may not even use the local storage to "cache" the streamed data. It might stream to an area in RAM and then be retrieved from there. We can also do things like NFS mounting, in which case it will render directly from the NAS drive(s). Would USB be too slow on the backend... probably? Again, depends on how we ve encoded, bitrates, what else will be using the drives at the same time, etc. USB drives make for nice, cheap, decent backup (but of course not mission critical data - RAID does that) on a NAS setup, because they're big and cheap and nobody cares that they're relatively slow.

...except when your slow SBC stutters on playback, because it's trying to shovel over data, decompress it, and stream it, with said data being fed from a slow USB drive.

The question is: which system should i take: i think i want to use a powerful Single board computer - (SBC) - which system is the most powerful today... with a little powerconsumption....i know alittle the following systems - pine64.com - banana pi - orange pi - http://forum.odroid.com/ developed by http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

If you want to know the specs of those systems, then GO LOOK THEM UP. You can easily compare them.

Also, for what you're describing, this falls firmly in the "why bother?" category. I can buy a 4TB Western Digital MyCloud device, which comes loaded with DLNA streaming server, NFS, SSH, Samba, and built-in network connectivity for $129. Built in web interface, too.


And further, you've had MANY threads where you've either never responded, or said you were going to come back and post the solutions:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ng-4175502799/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...mo-4175552133/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ne-4175516522/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...al-4175509667/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...db-4175509567/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...db-4175502185/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...db-4175506044/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ot-4175483510/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ne-4175468595/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ie-4175469965/

So....when are you going to?

I'd like to add, his last choice wasn't a SBC, but a forum for a group that has MULTIPLE SBC's, so we, the readers here, have no idea, which one has USB 3.0.