NAS

Following on from Ed’s reply in a new thread…

I agree that this is one case where spending an extra £35 will gain you so much more it’s in a different league. I’m sure you know what I’m going to say Synology DS115j

Dan, I got a bit frustrated yesterday with trying to respond so unlike BL I did not respond to the nub of your question! Building on BLs reply just use a 64GB USB as your main drive (OS+media) and only boot off an SD. This not only gives you most of what you want quite cheaply, but vastly improves the reliability of the Pi.

This article shows how to do it.

I found that in my media application I had a lot of r/w going on and the usb ran darned hot. I’d recommend buying a metal cased usb stick and superglue a heat sink to the top of it! If you need more than 64GB then bigger sticks are available but the price goes up 150-200%/GB

Apparently the experimental usb boot mode is picky with usb sticks. I used the linked one and it works.

On a Pi I would not bother about redundancy, its only a tiny beast so really hard work over an extended period can stress it to failure in areas other than the drive. A decent back-up regime is far more important. (Imaging the main drive and boot sectors are the best route). If you are really going to stress it over a long period, I’d recommend adding heat sinks to your pi (works better if you add a fan)

There are lots of Pi uses detailed on line – this person seems to have similar ideas to yourself which may be a good starting point. From memory I believe Drehzda may also have done something similar.

Ed P wrote:

On a Pi I would not bother about redundancy, its only a tiny beast so really hard work over an extended period can stress it to failure in areas other than the drive. A decent back-up regime is far more important. (Imaging the main drive and boot sectors are the best route). If you are really going to stress it over a long period, I’d recommend adding heat sinks to your pi (works better if you add a fan) There are lots of Pi uses detailed on line – this person seems to have similar ideas to yourself which may be a good starting point. From memory I believe Drehzda may also have done something similar.

I think it might have been Freakshow that went down that route in the end – I did try it but I ended up just changing the SSH port, accessing it via SFTP instead with a fail2ban server running on it. I stopped that when I got the Synology, but I have recently opened the Pi up to the outside again at home, as it’ll run tasks that the Synology wont (Pi-Hole as one example, and shell scripts with programs as another). I do have one at my local cadet hut that’s running as a print and file server, allowing me to print to the printer wirelessly and it’s running Resilo Sync so that I can sync documents etc that we need to work on.

Dave Rice wrote:

Router NAS-from-a-USB-drive solutions usually perform well enough for light use and I include home file serving as light usage. But I don’t recall one that allows access from the internet. That brings a whole raft of potential security issues and that leads me right back to the Synology. Drive redundancy? Well you must have a backup whether you do or you don’t. In a business solution you want continuity of service, in a home scenario I’d say that a few days without access is not going to be a deal breaker. Plus bear in mind that with Synology Hyper backup there is a utility that allows you to explore the backup files from a PC should you need to get hold of some files desperately. The other solution you could look into is another Pi running Tonido Tippon put me onto Tonido and I did use it for a while, until I go the Synology…

Dave my Asus allows access to theUSB  files via the internet using FTP. And ES File Explorer can add the FTP share as a resource and stream quite happily over the net. I did a TP-Link for someone last year and I’m sure I set that up the same way. My Asus runs Merlin firmware but I think the featue is in the stock firmware as well. FTP can be clunky but with the right client (e.g. ES it is just another folder – takes a bit longer to load but then plays fine).