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I am completely new to Raspberry Pi, and don't know a lot about it. My knowledge on hardware, software and programming (except for basic Python) is also very limited.

However, I read you can make a NAS out of a Raspberry Pi. I browsed through some questions here, and even saw some tutorials, but in every case it seems that only low-power NAS can be made from Raspberry Pi.
I'd like to create a NAS that gives me instant access to files and/or streams HD videos.

Is this possible to accomplish with a Raspberry Pi?
If so, will it still be cheaper than a regular NAS solution?

JNat
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3 Answers3

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I use my Pi as a NAS and it works great. I have a 2TB powered external HDD where I store my HD movies. I installed Samba for filesharing. Streaming over LAN is incredibly quick, does not stutter at all. Over WiFi though you would definitely run into problems.

My setup cost me £35 for the Pi and another £70 for the 2TB disk bringing the total to £105, cheaper than any other NAS solution I could find at the time. I have been using this system for about 6 months and it hasn't given me any problems so far (aside from the occasional SD card corruption that tends to happen with Raspberry Pis)

nagyben
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Late to the party but the below link is to a performance test of the Raspberry Pi as well as the Banana Pi. It confirms some of the comments already made here, but also points to an alternative possibly better than Raspberry Pi.

https://www.htpcguides.com/raspberry-vs-banana-pi-benchmarks-sata-gigabit-matter/

codechimp
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Most of the time when low-power in mentioned it is talking about wall power, and the less power you pull to accomplish the same work the better, so yay. on the other hand the rpi is not optimized for very fast I/O like a purpose built NAS box should be, so It may be slower, so boo. Will it work as a NAS? yes. The best? No. Good enough? maybe, It depends on what your good enough is.

hildred
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