What kind of performance are you getting?

My setup is very similar - with 500Gb Western Digital powered drive, NTFS, with a mixed-platform network - Windows, Mac, Linux. I'd thought of writing it up, but I'd be going over the same ground - Jeremy's tutorial is excellent.

Re 'Thomas' on performance,it's pretty good. I've just done some quick checks with an image-rich 30Mb PDF file. Rendering it on the Macbook from a local file takes about 4 seconds and fetching it from the Pi over the network makes little difference. Rendering it on the XP machine from a local file is just a little slower Rendering it on the Pi itself, from a local file is painfully slow - some 75 seconds

Re 'KnowledgeKeeper and ext2/ext3, I don't think so. I'd think that NTFS is surely best for mixed-platform, and I rather imagine that Samba does not involve the slow ntfs-g in the data transfers to the client?

Just a tip, you don't need to restart your Linux box to test whether auto-mount is working. `mount -a` mounts all entries in `/etc/fstab` file.

It would be wise to instead do it by device UUID and place the UUID in the fstab instead.

Hi, When trying to mount my USB HD I get told, Mount
is denied because the NTFS volume is already mounted, or another software may
use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command.

Any idea?
Cheers.

4 years later! I fixed this by running "sudo umount /dev/sda1" or whichever device you've got. Then, I ran "sudo mount -a" to reread the /etc/fstab and use the mount definitions in that file. Worked like a charm.

I am getting the same error. Any answers??

See above.

Will this work with Raspbmc as well? Because I want to have possibility to write/delete on External HDD connected to Pi from my Windows machine

would this be fast enough to serve up movie size mp4's 1(.5gig or so) to one computer at a time on the local network?

I used a USB 1TB drive for this very eason and it worked. Not sure if there may be other factors - network bandwidth, pc performance etc - but on Raspi file server it worked for me over wireless.

Just a note; vfat isn't very stable and ntfs in linux over ntfs-3g burns cpu. It would be wise to use native ext3 or ext4; you'd get better performance and more cpu for other uses.

Thanks Jeremy. I've linked to your post if you don't mind ;)

hey..this tutorial seems really informative and i am gonna make my file server for sure this weekend..but i have a question that in this we actually connected windows xp/vista/7/8 to raspberry pi for connectivity..what if i want my phone to get connected with pi thats mounted with usb drive so that i can access the files/folders of my usb from my phone and make some changed in it..
a sooner reply would be highly appreciated..
thnx

How do I know the device I am mounting is "sda1" ? What is the point of the first step ? Identifying device name ?

how do I know it is "sda1" when I am mounting ?

I have an old (Gen 1) Drobo, where the DroboShare part has failed.

Is there any way you know to use the Pi as a DroboShare equivalent?

I have tried a number of approaches to getting the pi to act as a file server - without success. Tried this and it worked first time - thanks. One issue tho', after I reboot the pi the usb drive is mounted -as I want - but it doesnt ask for password or user name on the network to see the files. Should it and if so how do I get it to seek a username and password to gain access?

How can i access to this NAS from any network? can i use a DDNS?

great write up thank you very much!

This is the tutorial that I tries that worked the first time. Thanks

how do you allow multiple users?

Hi there, hopefully someone is still reading this......There are lots of comments about not using NTFS below. If I wanted to use EXT3 how would I mount the drive? Thanks

Hi, what sort of throughput (MB/s) do you get on this setup?

I don't suppose anyone knows a simple way to encrypt this setup without manual boot authentication?
Or a suitable enclosure which would hold a Pi and HDD and power both?

What is if I want to use 2 ExternalHDDs? How can I do that?

Anyone facing an issue running ArchLinux on raspberry pi and the SVN server? I find that sometimes if I check out a large project or commit something with large files (zip files and .wma files) it freezes up. While its freezing I can't SSH into the box so I know it's frozen. Also these large files are less than 600mb. I'm not sure if Rpi is just too low on memory to handle this sort of stuff. (Also I have plenty of space on the SD card for all of this of course).

Thanks, worked nicely

Hi!

I followed your tutorial but I have a problem when I try to access the share from Windows 7 SP 1 PC. I always get the error "Access denied".
I made a share for a folder on my USB driver, like you do and that didn't work. Then I tryed to create a new share for testing of my /home/pi/Desktop folder and using the same configuration on smb.conf, it works well! So, can you give me a hint on where's the problem?
Thanks!

Hi,
I get the same error "Access denied" from my Windows machines. It works fine within the pi Desktop. I am interested in any suggestions.
Thanks

I was able to resolve my issue. The drive was not mounted properly. I had to unmount the drive and followed the steps over again. It is working now.

Excelent I just follow along, was easy -more than write this, since I am from Mexico-, and done in a cuple of minutes. Muchas Gracias

Thank you for this tutorial!

How to do this with an USB 5 bay unit ?
Can you give some hints plz ..

Don't use NTFS, you will be wasting CPU cycles.
Use ext3, it's more reliable and efficient.

Jeremy, you are a legend! I'm a complete Linux noob and spent way too much time muddling around with others' advice on this. I reflashed everything and started again using your instructions. It worked first pop. Thanks so much!

My next mission is to try and get a separate partition on the same HDD working as a Time Machine backup. I wish you'd written a guide on that. Thanks again. :-)

Fantastic tutorial :)

Best tutorial evar.
Thanks.

Hi Jeremy,

I'm trying to follow your tutorial here, but whenever I try to mount the drive (which mounts fine on my other Linux box), it says "special device /dev/sda1 does not exist". When I do the tail command, I can clearly see it as [sda]. Any ideas?

I'm using a WD My Passport 1.5 gb, with a dual USB cord. I thought power was the issue originally, so I got the dual usb cord, but still having the same issue...

Thanks, Jeremy. Using my second Raspberry Pi as a file server is great compared to my Ubuntu 12.04 File Server in an old Dell Pentium 4 computer.

Does anyone know why when I restart I lose write rights and says i need permission from unix user/root

Thanks

Can you have more than one USB drive running at the same time?

This would be complemented nicely by a tutorial on setting up Rsync on the pi... Making a nice backup device.

Great tutorial Jeremy, thanks. Think I'll get pi now, sounds like fun.

While this is interesting, I can just as easily plug my external hard drive into my network router and instant file sharing. I do like the exercise tho :)

Nice work! I just want to warn you about using external usb drive with ntfs file system - I've used one for external backup attached to linux box (MyBook was 2TB) and after almost every accidental power down it losses all information e.g. partition table.

I use this (Samba/USB HDD/Raspberry Pi) to serve music files to a Sonos machine and it works fine, no performance problems from the Sonos device or Windows. It's been running for about 4 months.

Its a really low-powered option if you are a Watt-watcher, most of the USB powered HDDs consume very few watts when not in use, and the RPi is always a power sipper.

Nice tut, nothing much different from setting up a file server on any other PC, but it shows how powerful can this little thing be! I gotta buy one :)

I did something similar about six months ago, but with netatalk instead of Samba. That proved too slow for my purposes, so I had to scrap it.

This is something for me to do once I am able to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi unit. Great tutorial and great idea.