Video Idea : Raspberry PI 4B as a file server

[Chronigan]

Hello All,

 

I have been wanting to build a home media/file/backup server for a while now, but have always been put off by the cost. However the Raspberry PI 4B seems like it, partnered with a 5 or 6 bay external storage device might make an affordable device for someone like me, But I have several questions, which os would be best to use, One Media Vault, FreeNas, or some other os? Which file system btrfs zfs or simply raid? What sort of read and write speeds can I expect and how many simultaneous users would such a device be able to reliably support?

 

I would really appreciate an LTT video with the answers to these questions before I go and spend my money on the hardware.

[RedWulf]

They're pretty popular for file servers, but if you're looking at several bays and many terabytes, I would recommend looking at "prebuilt" solutions. At the end of it all, you're going to be limited by the Pi's USB bandwidth, network, and limited processing power. I know there are several reviews of the other Pis for these projects, I'd imagine there are some for the 4 as well. 

 

I attached a couple USB HDDs to my Pi 2 running Raspian for awhile, just for movies and some other work, I never had any issues. That is however much lighter work than multiple people accessing larger volumes at once. 

 

I'd like a LTT discussion on it, but the video market for it is pretty saturated already tbh.

[Hypersniper]

Hey I just installed openmediavault on my raspberrypi 4.

I added 2 2TB WD drives to a USB 3.0 hub w/power supply then created a RAID 1 between them. 

I'm getting 110MB write and 120MB read on ethernet connection with large files.

I am really impressed to be honest.

Barely any CPU usage while transferring files.

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, Chronigan said:

Hello All,

 

I have been wanting to build a home media/file/backup server for a while now, but have always been put off by the cost. However the Raspberry PI 4B seems like it, partnered with a 5 or 6 bay external storage device might make an affordable device for someone like me, But I have several questions, which os would be best to use, One Media Vault, FreeNas, or some other os? Which file system btrfs zfs or simply raid? What sort of read and write speeds can I expect and how many simultaneous users would such a device be able to reliably support?

 

I would really appreciate an LTT video with the answers to these questions before I go and spend my money on the hardware.

1) FreeNAS has no Raspberry Pi version, OMV is the only choice

2) RAID isn't a filesystem

3) OMV supports EXT3 & 4, BtrFS and ZFS, what you use depends on what you need

4) 100base Speeds or ~100MB/s assuming you use USB3

5) Depends on what files. Mine can easily do 3 simultaneous 1080p streams, never tried more than that. It also easily handles X265/HEVC stuff and for X264 content I'd say you'll max the network before the CPU, watching an X264 video doesn't even register on the CPU monitor.

 

The only issue I encountered was my drive not sleeping (I chose to do 1 big drive rather than multiple small ones), this was easily fixed using an app called hd-idle. OMV doesn't have great support for power managing external drives.

 

A few extra things, install OMV Extras and you'll get the option to install an excellent DNLA server for serving your media files, a bit torrent client, an Airport sharing server for macOS, a PXE boot server and TFTP server for network booting, a DHCP server, an OpenVPN client and much much more besides.