Making an external drive -> NAS

I’ve got an external 1TB RAID hard drive which is currently plugged into my laptop. Ideally I’d like to get this on our home wi-fi network rather than having it plugged into the laptop. Two reasons for this:

-Have just got a Sonos system and this setup would hopefully allow access to iTunes library without the need for the laptop.
-Access to the drive can be a pain if using the laptop elsewhere in the house, other than the desk where the drive is.

My router is from Virgin Media and doesn’t have a connection for serving USB external drives. However even if it did I suspect it wouldn’t be a fast connection. I have a Raspberry Pi currently doing not a lot but also think that this may not be fast enough…..

The drive has eSATA and USB connections.

Any suggestions?

Buy a new network drive and keep the usb drive as a backup. You can never have too many copies.

Raspberry Pi Nano (£4) – and set it up as a wee SAMBA/CIFS server.

Actually, you’ll need some form of networking, a micro(?)-SD card and possibly some USB adapters – but you could be up and going for around £10-15 even if you don’t have the bits lying about.

Edit – or use the PI you have 🙂 – should not be too bad just serving files to your network. I think it’d struggle if you wanted it to do any transcoding etc. but as a file server, it should be fine.

Thanks, actually a Raspberry Pi 2 might do it. The ethernet connection would be useful. The Pi Zero lacks this

I did have my Pi set up as a samba server, performance was really bad though.

Think it was to do with there only being a single USB bus on the pi, so the ethernet controller and the hdd were on the same bus.

Don’t know if this has been fixed on the Pi 2.

I’ve done a wee bit of messing about with a Zero – I got a USB wireless dongle to plug into it (£6 or something). Wired ethernet will almost certainly be a lot better.

I’ve not tried it as a samba server yet so can’t comment on the performance. You shouldn’t need a big throughput for SONOS as it’s audio. You hear many stories of folks using the PI as a Plex server or similar so that’s streaming HD video.

1. Buy a Synology or Qnap box and a hard drive.
2. Copy contents of USB drive to your NAS.
3. Have a nice cup of tea.

If cash is really tight you could skip the new hard drive, copy all the date from the old usb enclosure to somewhere, put the old drives in the NAS box, format them and copy the data back, but ideally, I’d keep the old enclosure as an off-line backup for the NAS.