[Wylug-discuss] Linux NAS advice.

[Jim Jackson]

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Will Newton wrote:

> 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.

At least the Debain based Raspbian Distro will be available for the life of 
the RPI, and is customised for the ARMv6. From what I've seen so far you 
will need to pay out at least double - but if you know of cheaper I'd be 
interested. 

I reckon the RPI would make a pretty good home DNS, DHCP, NTP, syslog, SMTP 
and IMAP mailserver - with maybe a bit of light fileserving on the side.
You could even solar power your server like Rob is doing.