RAID on PI

[The Falcon]

Hi guys. 

My friend presented me with a very interesting question. In a scenario where you are using your RPI to run NAS and low level services is it possible to run the external HDDs in raid 0 for better performance and if so how would you go about doing that? 

 

Also is it possible to add an external Ethernet adapter to get 1000Mbps network speed on your pi? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

You you can as linux supports raid on any block device(usb stick, hdd, iscsi) 

 

DON"T DO THIS

 

Its slow due to 100mbps ethernet running of usb 2.0

 

Even with a usb to gig your still limited to about 200mbps as the usb port is used for the hdd and ethernet. 

 

Don't run raid 0

 

If you want a small nas buy a synology or qnap.

[The Falcon]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Even with a usb to gig your still limited to about 200mbps as the usb port is used for the hdd and ethernet. 

Is it not possible to run it as GPIO to gig to get better speed? also 200Mbps is better than 100Mbps at the end of the day.

Plus I think it is just that in RAID 0 the 2x 1TB drives look like 2TB instead of looking like 2x 1TB drives 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, The Falcon said:

Is it not possible to run it as GPIO to gig to get better speed? also 200Mbps is better than 100Mbps at the end of the day.

Plus I think it is just that in RAID 0 the 2x 1TB drives look like 2TB instead of looking like 2x 1TB drives 

You can't use gpio as its very slow

 

Yes its faster, but still much slower. Buy a synology nas for about 170 if you want a cheap nas thats fast. Transferring large files will take a while.

 

The PI is a bad nas

[The Falcon]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can't use gpio as its very slow

 

Yes its faster, but still much slower. Buy a synology nas for about 170 if you want a cheap nas thats fast. Transferring large files will take a while.

 

The PI is a bad nas

I hear you. Interesting points the only thing is if we wanted to run some low intensity services for all the devices on the network the NAS would not be able to do this but a pi acting as a NAS and server kills 2 birds with one stone that costs half the price. 

I do hear you that the performance will be rubbish, I guess that would be up to my friend then. I have linked him to this thread.

Thanks for the replies guys

[Huntsman]

Doable, but won't work as you expect. All the IOs except for GPIO, display and audio works off a USB "adapter". They all share the same "lane" so the fastest speed you would get in total (USB + Ethernet) is the USB2.0 speed.

 

So to answer your question,

1. Raid 0 is possible but won't give you any performance benefit.

2. Gigabit ethernet will never be possible.

[KuJoe]

There are other options besides Raspberry Pis. I recommend looking at the Orange Pi Plus (has an onboard SATA II port with 1Gbps NIC) or an ODroid C2 which has better performance along with MicroSD and eMMC card support and a 1Gbps NIC for the same price as a Raspberry Pi 3.

[dzonidev]

On 7/8/2016 at 9:45 PM, The Falcon said:

-snip- 

One thing that drove me nuts with RPIs is that they share a controller for USB and Ethernet, meaning that you can't even reach 100Mbps if you are accessing a USB HDD. I don't know if they fixed this on 2 and 3.

RPIs are not really meant for storage because of the poor controller performance. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's pointless. @KuJoe is right, there are much better solutions for storage that cost the same, maybe even less.