This post is older than a year. Consider some information might not be accurate anymore.
What do you do if you have a bunch of spare (old) hardware, e.g. USB 2.0 hubs;-hard drives;-sticks and sd-cards? Well you can make a NAS file server with Raspberry Pi.
The reasons for that:
- Since the rpi doesn’t support more than USB 2.0, perfect.
- USB hard drives are perfect for data storage and as primary root filesystem for the rpi
- Power consumption is low, my current NAS 15-22W, the rpi with usb-stuff 1.5-2.5W
- Online 24/7
- Consume flash devices until they wear out on purpose, less drives
- Because it’s fun.
And how about the costs?
- The newest Raspberry Pi ~ 40 EUR/CHF
- A 16 GB micro SD ~ 8-10 EUR/CHF
You will get the Rasberry Pi alone. It has no power supply. What about the power supply? Well I have a lot of power supplies from my previous smartphones, you only need a adapter with micro-USB connection, that’s it. Even IKEA has cheap power supplies for 10 CHF. The power supply should have an minimum output of 1.8A. See more on FAQ-Power. A network cable or WLAN adapter and you are ready to go. Additionally you might want a shell case.
Other purposes?
- Apache HTTP server
- Multimedia center
- etc.
Is that possible? Well, the latest Pi has following specs: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
- A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
- 1GB RAM
Like the (Pi 1) Model B+, it also has:
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- Full HDMI port
- Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- Camera interface (CSI)
- Display interface (DSI)
- Micro SD card slot
- VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
