Posted by So my first goal as in my Raspberry Pi plan (http://www.geekays.net/post/Pi-of-Life-Setting-it-up.aspx) was to check if a NAS on the Raspberry Pi is effective or not. I am sure it cannot be as sturdy and performing as that of a standard NAS box – as they pack a board specifically for that purpose with RAID capabilities. The Pi does not have a built in SATA interface and the option is to connect a USB HDD.
I was using my 1TB USB-3 HDD as a shared drive for my home. I connected it to the USB-3 port of my Dlink 2750U router that I did some #modding earlier. However the performance was too poor. It can write large files hardly at ~1 MB/s and the reading speed is marginally higher. And there was no way I can plan of accessing it from outside as I cannot do a NATting for the USB port on the router.
I thought of shifting this HDD to the Raspberry Pi. However the USB port on the Pi is USB-2 and designed to perform at a lower speed that the USB-3. So I thought of running a benchmark. So I grabbed the HDD benchmark tool from http://www.attotech.com/disk-benchmark/ and ran benchmark on the HDD while it is connected on the router’s USB-3. Stored the results.
Next is to connect the HDD on the Raspberry Pi. I set up Samba on my Raspberry Pi and connected the USB HDD on it. Did the additional configurations. And once it is set up, I ran the benchmark tool again. To my pleasant surprise, the performance of the HDD on the Pi was almost 100% better than the earlier configuration.
So it is a happy ending..or better a happy beginning!