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**mxlance** · 2015-02-15, 16:39

is this a good idea, bad or just plain crazy stupid?

my idea is a pi NAS that would download torrents and serve media to a second Pi running kodi.
a mac mini would handle metadata retrieval.

i looked for info on this but was no clear if it would really work.
is this plan sound or has my reading lead me down the preverbal path of pain frustration and suffering?

thanks

ashman70 · 2015-02-15, 18:26

One thing you have to consider is that corruption of the file system on the SC card is a risk. Unlike hard drives, SSD's or even flash drives, SD cards get worn out over time the more files are written to them. For a long term project like this, I don't think the Pi would be a good fit.

**mxlance** · 2015-02-15, 18:48

sorry for my confusion and ignorance.
i thought the SD card was only for the OS and Apps not writing files to.
all files would be written and stored on the 3 or 4 attached drives.
what do i not understand here?

thanks for your help

bertybassett · 2015-02-15, 19:23

get a Qnap or synology instead. Much easier and better.

**mxlance** · 2015-02-15, 19:29

that sounds like the best option but not on my budget.
which is next to nothing.

thanks

**Prof Yaffle** · 2015-02-15, 19:39

Well, I guess it would work, but you have a couple of bottlenecks: you haven't got much RAM, so there's limited scope to cache files/indices, and all your drives are USB vs internal SATA. The nature of *ix operating systems means swap space and temp files, so you would be writing to flash unless you can boot and run from another external drive.

You do have things like Pogoplug NASes, though, so I can't see why not - you need very little processing power to serve files, after all, especially if it's to only one client at a time (multiple clients is where filesystems and RAM come in, as well as the issues of concurrent random reads on external drives sharing the same USB bus). If you don't have an old laptop lying around that you could use, the other option would be to see if your router or an extension access point supports an external drive (or two, or three).

**mxlance** · 2015-02-15, 19:51

thanks
more to think about.
i found a few Pi NAS articles with google. but none for media other than mp3.
it sounded like a great low cost low power idea.
but i am new to the Pi and to NAS.
so it is difficult to evaluate.
more reading to do/

thanks again

FlowT · 2015-02-15, 20:13

I was thinking about doing something like that along the same lines at some point. Currently I have an old laptop though for that purpose that probably outperforms any of those micro arm boards by far.

It all depends what you want from it. Just serving files and running a torrent client should probably work ok though from one of these boards. One bottleneck on the pi that definitely comes to mind is the slow ethernet port. So maybe you could look into one of the alternatives to the PI that actually have a dedicated 10/100/1000 Ethernet port. Like the Odroid-C1 or the Banana PI.

Sure sounds like a fun little project and if you have to read up a bit you'll learn something as well.

**mxlance** · 2015-02-15, 21:31

those are some good points and the banana pi was mentioned in an article but did not say why it was recommended.
i will look into it now.
thnanks

MrCrispy · 2015-02-15, 23:52

Its very much possible.

http://www.tinkernut.com/portfolio/make-...d-storage/

With the Pi2 the cpu power should be enough to even get and serve metadata. File servers don't need much cpu and with the low power and form factor the Pi2 is pretty much ideal. The bottleneck will be storage transfer speeds. And gigabit ethernet will help.

The Odroid C1 has Openmediavault as well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmedi...%20images/

**mxlance** · 2015-02-16, 00:24

very cool info.
maybe this is not a mad idea after all.
thank you

poplap · (This post was last modified: 2015-02-16, 05:10 by poplap.)

So I currently have a RPi (the first 512MB B not the B+) running Open Media Vault raspberry pi image and it works well enough. I have an old 1tb seagate drive and a newer 3tb WD drive connected to it with the WD serving videos only. This thing is no speed demon but I can stream H264 compressed Blurays with DTS-HD audio (though only using DTS core) to another raspberry pi (2 with OSMC) just fine. I get about 7-10MB/s on a good day. I have it running BTSync and a few other things, you could even run MySQL on it but I'm not sure how well that will perform. You can not stream multiple video files or they will start lagging but I could stream a movie and work on a few txt files. Transferring movies takes 30-60+mins for a standard blu ray.

Like I said it works well enough for a setup like mine. I currently live in a dorm and only have one tv. I really did this to test and hold me over till I could afford something better but If you are willing it could probably work. I could move over to a raspberry pi 2 for the server and then I could probably satrate the 100Mb\s ethernet connection but I'm probably not going to bother.

I would recommend the Open Media Vault Rpi image (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmedi...%20images/), it has a nice web interface and plugin system, real user freindly. though the web interface is kinda slow on the Rpi 1.

EDIT: Oh and overclock it, it helps.

MrCrispy · 2015-02-16, 08:53

Useful info in this thread - http://forums.openmediavault.org/index.p.../?pageNo=1

bertybassett · 2015-02-16, 12:14

get a old PC and run openmediavault better still cheap and cheerful.

**mxlance** · 2015-02-16, 14:41

this is starting to sound better and better.
it is just my wife and i, and we have no need to stream to more than one tv at a time (most of the time).
i took a quick look at the banana pi but there are a lot of bad reliability reviews. that makes me nervous.

thanks for all the help and info this is great.