[Wylug-discuss] Linux NAS advice.

[Will Newton]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Jim Jackson <jj at franjam.org.uk> wrote:
>> So to speak a little PC. Best would be if you could just take any
>> Ubuntu and put it on the NAS. A Raspberry PI would do it, but is
>> 'naked' and still requires an external HD.
>
> A word of warning about RaspberryPi - Ethernet traffic AND external
> USB disk traffic SHARE a link from the USN/Ether chip to the ARM chip, and
> that link is HiSpeed USB 2. So if you are file serving, the data goes up
> this link from the disk to the cpu, then back down the link from cpu to
> ether. This link is a serious performance bottle neck. I'd search for
> RPI USB fileserving benchmarks before committing to using the RPI for
> anything other than trivial fileserving.

Agreed. It's also a pretty bad USB host controller in the Broadcom
chip which pushes a lot of load onto the CPU. The core used is an
ARMv6 too which is not that well supported - for example Fedora are
switching to ARMv7 only and I expect other distros will follow suit in
coming months and years. A little extra money spent will get you a
much better board than Raspberry Pi.