What has worked best for you? Looking for hardware and software recommendations. Moving from a old 2-bay Synology.
Samba server http://dietpi.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5&start=10#p56
Have one running on my XU4 as NAS (USB3.0)
C2 and NanoPi Neo 2 makes a good fileserver (Gbit eth), but lacks USB3.0.
If your running RPi 1, then proftpd would offer more performance/throughput, however, you’d need a FTP client.
Thanks. I am on a Pi3 at present as Roon endpoint. Thanks for your help on the Roon forums.
I asked this in another thread but will here, too. I did a ROCK installation on a NUC and tried to access the internal share (one connects as Guest) via dietpi and couldn’t. I could access my NAS so I don’t think think it is a network issue. Is there an issue in dietpi’ setup connecting as Guest?
I just set this up tonight.
- RPi 3
- 2x refurb Western Digital My Passport 1TB USB HDDs
- HooToo HT-UH010 USB hub
- Samba
The choice of HDDs is tricky. I read that a certain Seagate drive would work when connected through a hub, but found the newer model that replaced it didn’t work. On the other hand, certain WD drives are said not to work through a hub, but the ones I bought did happen to work. You’ll have to do some research before you buy HDDs.
To my surprise, DietPi detects and mounts the HDDs automatically when you boot a fresh image for the first time with the hub and drives connected. Not too crazy about the dir names it chooses for the mount points, but whatever.
Follow these steps:
- Plug the drives into the hub
- Plug the power adapter into the hub
- Connect the hub to the RPi
- Plug the power adapter into a mains socket
- Put the SD card with fresh DietPi image into the RPi
- Power up the RPi and install DietPi as usual
- Install Samba
- Find the HDD mount points in /mnt (these will have large integers as filenames)
- Set up Samba shares on one of the HDDs and restart Samba
- Create a new crontab, add this line, and save the crontab
0 3 * * * rsync -av --delete /mnt/1234567890 /mnt/0987654321/
This will backup the HDD mounted at /mnt/1234567890 to the other HDD at /mnt/0987654321 every morning at 3 o’clock. Edit to suit your own backup schedule.
I forgot to point out that the choice of USB hubs is important if the HDDs don’t have their own separate power adapters. Most cheap hubs don’t supply power to the connected devices, and the RPi 3 struggles to power even one HDD. The HooToo model above works beautifully. Expect to spend at least $40 for a good Anker or HooToo hub.
Is the XU4 worth the money Fourdee? I’m having serious performance issues with syncing on NextCloud and I believe it’s down to the limitations of the Pi3 board (namely the shared eth/usb BUS - At least that’s what I’m told). Processing changes for large folders on sync and actually uploading anything above 40+MB in size is painfully slow and pauses a lot. I’d be willing to pay for it just to not have the estimated 16 day timeframe for downloading my music again…
I tried to use OpenMediaVault and it was a bit difficult. I only need to share a 3TB USB disc with some of my devices, so OpenMediaVault was really overkill. Read this topic and installed DietPi with only Samba and voila - excellent NAS system 
It’s now copying all my files with rsync from my Synology NAS and that also works great. True Rpi3 doesn’t have USB3 - but for storing movies and music it’s not really necessary.
The 100Mb/s ethernet will always be the choke point in any NAS…if it has gigabit, then awesome…otherwise you will only get 11.5~MB/s thruput, but it will do it at crazy low power consumption rather than setting up an older desktop as a file server