I need an external enclosure for my raspberry pi NAS. To begin with I'll probably only have one drive (WD Red) connected, but may put a second one in if I need more space. Would be ok if its actively cooled as it will be placed out of the way in a spare room. Preferably USB3, I know the pi is only USB2 but it seems daft not to get USB3. I've seen an IcyBox dual bay on Scan for £58 which sounds quite good value considering the single drive generic stuff on amazon are £20 each. Does anyone have any recommendations for enclosures?
IcyBox doesn't always make it's own stuff - find a picture of their model and try google reverse image search for model numbers of oem versions. You might find it a lot cheaper.
The Raspberry Pi 4 has two USB 3.0 ports and PCIe-connected full-speed gigabit Ethernet; using an earlier model for a NAS is false economy and will dramatically hamper performance.
That's good to know. I've got a pi3 just sitting around doing nothing that I got for free so thought I'd make it do something. It's only going to be media streaming. *EDIT* Found a WD MyBook Duo enclosure without any disks for £35 on ebay so I've got that. Even though I don't really "need" it, I can see a pi4 purchase coming on soon just because,
For SD and HD content, it should work; probably not for Ultra HD though. And it absolutely won't do live transcoding (but neither will the Pi 4.) The "gigabit" port on a Pi 3+ is limited to about 250Mb/s (megabits, not megabytes) - *and* it's shared with the USB ports. In other words, while you can pull around 30MB/s (megabytes, not megabits) from USB storage, that's saturating the shared USB lane between the ports and the network. If you're trying to stream files from USB via the network, you can halve that - 15MB/s at best, 10MB/s more reasonably. A Pi 4 can not only sustain 950Mb/s via Ethernet, it can do it at the same time as using the USB ports - and can pull around 350MB/s over those. Literally an order of magnitude faster. I'd play around with what you've got, and if you like it splash out on a £35 Pi 4 2GB - they're fully compatible, so you can literally take the microSD out of one and put it in the other with no reconfiguration.
Great info, especially about being able to just swap sd cards, didn't know that. Would like to find something for these pi's to do, I think I've got two 2Bs and a 3 now and they just sit in a drawer, Want to get everything into the same format so transcoding isn't required, was nice when using TVersity on my PC but didn't want to 'have' to run the PC to watch anything.
