Raspberry Pi for a file server

I'm thinking about getting one of those, pic related, raspberry pi 3, model B.

I have a couple of spare HDD that would like to have accessible via FTP.

Is it a good idea to get a raspberry pi for the job?

If you can consolidate your data on to one drive a Cubietruck has a sata port and gigabit Lan. You need some kind of power adapter for 3.5" drives though.

As long as you're happy having an incredibly slow fileserver it's perfect. The network speed is limited by processor/bus and you're going to further limit i/o by USB. Other than that it works fine.

Lack of gigabit ethernet and SATA ports are pretty huge limitations for a file server these days though.

Piss poor idea. It would be incredibly slow, your bandwidth will be limited partly by the fact that USB and Ethernet share the same bus.

If you really want a fileserver save up for a cheapo mini ITX board or something (or buy a used one).

No

>no gigabit lan
waste of money

It might be more practical to use the GPIO pins for adding harddrives but that would require technical knowledge.

Depends on which Pi

none of the Pis have gigabit ethernet, the best you can do is use an adapter that only gives you slightly better but still no where as close.

This. Ethernet and USB are controlled by the same chip, the Ethernet itself has a slow speed. Only maxing at 10 meg/sec. You're better off with a Chinese variant like the banana pi or orange pi, I can't remember the specs but I think either is better for NAS over the RPI

they work fine with powered xternal hard drive

i got mine as nfs server its a workhorse
usb hard drive (powered), plugged into it
nfs shares, it mounts other clients, serves
it's what they are for

The BPi is also slow because the A20 is slow.
A20 is the last Allwinner SOC to have a SATA interface.

I always wondered about this design choice, it is not as if Broadcom doesn't know about fast IO.

Let's hope version 4.0 fixes this, progression has been pretty good so far.

>Is it a good idea to get a raspberry pi for the job?

No, it's gonna be really slow

OrangePi zero, it's faster and costs $10

It's pretty good, ignore the others. It's isn't the fastest experience, but if you want to cobble something together, you can't go far wrong. Just don't use it as a main boot drive for the Raspberry Pi, it is a slow experience.

As you said, just get the Raspberry Pi 3 or 2, don't even think about using anything below that unless you like waiting for an eternity.

If you think that the Raspberry Pi is too slow, consider getting a HP ProLiant mini-server. Those things fly, and are quite cheap too, especially considering that they come with ECC memory.

You do realize that you'll have a maximum bandwidth of 12.5 Megabyste/s ?

...

this bitch has the right amount of mommyfu
me won fucki sucki boom boom

Im using a pi3 as network data.

Its usb2 to a 2.5 hdd and 100mb lan to my router.

Its a shit idea op. I only use it to store all my photos.. But its still a shit idea. I dont use all my photos and that very often, so its ok for me. But its actually a shit idea op.

Dont be a retard.

Just buy a cheap mini itx pc