Pi File – The RPI as a NAS

Having a bit of time on my hands and a spare RPi I have been going a bit mad ? PiHole has been a great success and I have also created a web enabled controller for my Ubiquiti kit. That should save me some money on the AWS server (although it isn’t much).

Anyway, I visited a retired mate of mine and he really could do with some NAS to replace the multiple USB drives he backs up to but even a basic Synology takes some thinking about money wise. So I started thinking, what about attaching one of his USB drives to an RPi instead? So the whole thing snowballed and I started doing some serious testing using an RPI B wired and wireless, a 1 bay DS112j on Gigabit and a 2 bay DS216j on Gigabit. Clients were a desktop on N300, a laptop on AC433 and a desktop on Gigabit. The same 2.5″ 5,400 rpm USB drive was used throughout and the NAS both have the same Toshiba P300 3TB drives. The 2 bay is RAID 1.

This is what I came up with:

The first thing that struck me was how much quicker the 2 bay is than the 1 bay. The next thing was how crap the Pi wireless is and N300 whilst better is no great shakes. If you only have N300 a Synology NAS is basically going to waste as just a file server, but of course you can do so many things with it.

With the PI on it’s 100 mbps Ethernet both the Gigabit and AC433 maxed out the connection. On the Synologys they appear to have maxed out the USB drive. The new Pi 3B+ has 300m Ethernet and AC wireless. Extrapolating these figures out (dangerous I know) I reckon it will achieve mid 30’s MB/s the same as the Synology as the USB and connection will bottleneck at about the same time.

To me that make a Pi 3B+ very viable indeed as not only a file server but also a PiHole and UniFi server and probably a million and one other things that don’t require loads of CPU time.

All these benchmarks don’t of course tell the full tale. Yes in real life the Pi on wireless does seem sluggish, but if you’re only transferring a few files the 100 mbps connection is very usable indeed. Where all this really matters is when you are doing things like transferring big files (like videos) or backing up whole machines, it’s then that the Synology kit earns it’s keep. However I have small businesses that are doing a weekly archive of their Synologys to my server through the internet, which is 10 mbps at best even on fibre. The first backup takes hours and hours, the weekly incremental ones are a matter of minutes. So if you use proper backup software, like ToDo, EaseUs etc.  once you’re over the pain of making the first one it’s all downhill.

The guide I used to set up Samba is here It’s not quite correct and you have to umount your USB drive first (Raspian will mount them automatically when you plug them in). The default samba.conf file didn’t look quite like their’s but was easy to spot the difference and the bits you add to the end are the same.

EDIT – yes some of the results seem inconsistent, but the author of the testing software makes no bones about it being super accurate. It is accurate enough however to see what’s going on to the extent we need to.