Network Storage: Through router or Raspberry Pi?

[Jonathanese]

I just bought a 1TB hard drive to use for network storage. A Caviar Blue.

I currently have it set up through the ASUS RT-AC68U using samba, which I don't really know much about.

I transferred a 32GB file as my first test. I got a 16MB/s. I have two of these hard drives on my desktop in RAID-0, and get 250MB/s easily for consecutive read. So this is just really, really slow in comparison. I checked out the CPU usage of the router. It all jumps to 100% and the ram usage jumps up an additional 50% or so. I'm concerned this would massively eat into what throughput the router can handle.

OK, so I also just got a Raspberry Pi. And while it doesn't have USB-3.0, that clearly did me no good anyway on the router. So do you think I could see some nice improvement by using my Pi to handle NAS? Or would it basically come down to the same speeds?

 

[kanewolf]

16MB/s > 100Mbit which is the ethernet limitation of all the current Raspberry PI devices. So you won't get any better performance from a PI. If you want faster performance you should purchase a purpose built NAS enclosure, or build one with more capacity than a PI.

 

[Jonathanese]

Gotcha. Guess that also kills the possibility of using it for VPN passthrough.

I'll have to try it as a game streaming device and see if that is any good.

 

[kanewolf]

It is a cell phone without a display. Remember that context from a performance standpoint.