Raspberry Pi 2 Home Server??

[caveman178355]

Hi,
I was wondering if it would be possible to make a raspberry pi 2 home server.
My plan was to buy the raspberry pi, connect a wall powered usb hub, get some usb to sata data and power cables and connect some desktop hard disk drives.
OR
Connect some hdd docking stations and plug the hard disk drives into there.
Is either of these methods at all possible? If not is there an alternative? Also i have literally no experience with a raspberry pi or servers so please dont be harsh if this idea is completely stupid

 

[legokill101]

meh yes but you better off either buying an off the shelf nas or an external raid enclosure, or just bulding somthing from scratch, why did you go with the rasbery pie? cause it was cheap?

 

[kanewolf]

What functions (or services) do you want from this server? That might help us determine if there is a better solution.

 

[MyDocuments]

Why not take a look at the "How-To-Geek" website and search it for Raspberry Pi

( http://www.howtogeek.com/138281/the-htg-guide-to-getting-started-with-raspberry-pi/
& specifically
http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/ )

or even the Raspberry Pi mainsite

( https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/web-server-wordpress/ )

and checkout their articles.

Surely you must have also already perfomed a Google/Bing/Other search for anything particular that you want? There are lot's of how-to's out there for a Raspberry Pi if you care to look for them.

 

[caveman178355]

meh yes but you better off either buying an off the shelf nas or an external raid enclosure, or just bulding somthing from scratch, why did you go with the rasbery pie? cause it was cheap?

One reason was because it is cheap but i want to do something more involved than just building a server pc or buying a nas

 

[caveman178355]

What functions (or services) do you want from this server? That might help us determine if there is a better solution.

Accessing recorded files and editing them from there rather than clogging up the hdd in my pc, and also for storing films.

 

[caveman178355]

Why not take a look at the "How-To-Geek" website and search it for Raspberry Pi

( http://www.howtogeek.com/138281/the-htg-guide-to-getting-started-with-raspberry-pi/
& specifically
http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/ )

or even the Raspberry Pi mainsite

( https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/web-server-wordpress/ )

and checkout their articles.

Surely you must have also already perfomed a Google/Bing/Other search for anything particular that you want? There are lot's of how-to's out there for a Raspberry Pi if you care to look for them.

Thanks for the links and yeah i did search it (i know how to set up an rpi but never have) but they all were using external hard disk drives and normally servers dont use that so i thought it could be slow. Could i connect any number of external HDDs??

 

[kanewolf]

What functions (or services) do you want from this server? That might help us determine if there is a better solution.

Accessing recorded files and editing them from there rather than clogging up the hdd in my pc, and also for storing films.

For the features you want a true NAS optimized server would be better. Get a 2 drive version from one of the big three (Synology, Q-NAP, Thecus). Your performance will be MUCH better.

 

[MyDocuments]

You're welcome...

BTW that second link is the configuration I'm currently basing my Rasp-Pi setup off. I have 2x 1TB USB HDDs (Toshiba Canvio Basics) connected to a D-Link USB 2.0 4 Port Hub (DUB-H4 is the model - apparently preferred for Rasp-Pi in order to avoid feed-back current through the USB ports).

No, it won't be as fast as a dedicated NAS sitting on the LAN, but that wasn't my particular use-case (I have a Fritz!Box I could connect external USB3.0 drives to if I want reasonable performance and NAS functionality). I was looking more for an easy backup solution as mentioned in that arcticle, spread across two drives for a sort of RAID-Mirroring solution.
Plus, if I have it always on the power of the Pi is very minimal and the drives I think would enter a sleep mode and eventually spin-down thus saving more power (again not very perfomant, but that's not really my use-case).

At some later point I expect to do a few more thing with the Pi to gain more functionality while it's not performing backups, perhaps a Web-Server, Git-server and possibly another Pi (or similar) to create a remotely accessible Home-Cloud of sorts.