Raspberry Pi Can't Carry The Weight, Should I Go Nas


atte

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Hi

 

It seems the raspberry pi is simply not fast enough to handle my 140G with btsync. At least it's been indexing away for over a week and it's still 77.6G short...

 

So, what other options (preferrably low power and cheap) do I have? would a NAS be a better option? Which model(s) would be easiest to work with (for instance install linux on) and what are the power consumption?

 

Thanks!

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i gave a raspberry pi a go but it didnt do well.

 

A year or so ago i funded a kickstarter. I ended up getting one of these http://shop.udoo.org/eu/product/udoo-quad.html. Then installed openmediavault and btsync.

 

its a pretty capable low powered.

 

A few of the hardware specs

 

CPU Freescale i.MX 6 ARM Cortex-A9 Quad core 1GHz
RAM DDR3 1GB
Input Voltage (recommended) 6-15 V
Ethernet RJ45 (10/100/1000 MBit)
WiFi Module

SATA 

 

 

you can power a 3.5 inch HDD from the ardunio ports so you dont need an external power supply. There is tutorial on their forums. I added a WD Red 4TB for NAS 3.5-inch 

 

it runs away all powered from a 12v power adapter and its not to expensive

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If you want a cheap one, most low-end NAS devices are not faster than Raspberry Pi.

 

I am currently using 2 Raspberry Pis to sync ~40GB files and pretty happy. I may get a Zotac pico (P1320) later this year, it has 2GB RAM with an intel  atom1.33GHz processor, and I heard that you can add replace its 32GB SSD with a bigger one.

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I find it really strange that your rPi cannot handle this!

I keep about 350GB synchronized with btsync mostly without problems (about 7% CPU load when not syncing). That's the sum of my 8 shares, the largest of them contains around 150GB with mean file sizes of about 4MB I guess. I also have an admittedly very slow owncloud server running on the same raspberry.

 

Have you tried restarting the btsync service or rebooting the rPi? That can work wonders sometimes ;)

If you still go for more powerful hardware, I would also recommend the BananaPi as the most direct upgrade route from the raspberry - more cpu performance + sata almost without additional cost and with raspbian support.

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I'm very enouraged by your reply, it seems it's indeed possible to run btsync on the pi! Sure I've rebooted and/or restarted the btsync...

 

Did you install via the repo (http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/18974-debian-and-ubuntu-server-unofficial-packages-for-bittorrent-sync/) or by hand? What's the version of your btsync? Is your pi overclocked?

 

Here's my only enabled .conf, maybe I could have a look at yours?

{	"device_name": "hanstholm",	"listening_port" : 0,	"storage_path" : "/home/atte/.btsync",	"check_for_updates" : false,	"use_upnp" : true,	"download_limit" : 0,	"upload_limit" : 0, 	"webui" :	{	},	"shared_folders" :	[		{		"secret" : "----",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : true		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium/music/mp3_local/btsync",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium/music/mp3_local/btsync/a773",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium/music/synth/aspect/Presets/atte",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium/music/synth/ams/atte",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/large/photos/btsync/atte",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/large/photos/btsync/britt",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/large/britt/downloads",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/medium/music/undervisning/elektronisk_musik/btsync/",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		},		{		"secret" : "---",		"dir" : "/mnt/usb/atte/hanstholm/btsync/software",		"use_relay_server" : false,		"use_dht" : false,		"search_lan" : true,		"use_sync_trash" : false		}	]}
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@atte

I did a simple test - my Pi indexes 850Mb for around 90 seconds, so it would be 105s/Gb. So, your 350 Gb of data should be indexed for nearly 10 hours.

 

Though, there is one more peculiarity. Sync consumes 1kb of memory per file / folder. So if you've got tons of tiny files, they might not fit into memory as Pi will sink in a swap. What amount of files you try to index?

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Did you install via the repo (http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/18974-debian-and-ubuntu-server-unofficial-packages-for-bittorrent-sync/) or by hand? What's the version of your btsync? Is your pi overclocked?

 

Here's my only enabled .conf, maybe I could have a look at yours?

 

I installed tuxpoldo's repo and am up to date on that. I must admit my Pi is overclocked to 800MHz, but I cannot imagine that 100MHz make such a difference.

Another thought that came to my mind: Maybe you've got some special permissions on some files so that btsync maybe fails at indexing but doesn't say so?

 

And another thing: I put btsync's database/cache/whatever folder on my USB harddrive (see the conf below, /share/.btsync). Maybe you run into problems if you keep it on the SD Card and that may be running out of free space or just very slow?!

 

My conf: (I added my sync folders via the web ui several versions ago and they still work, so I didn't bother to include them in the conf)

//!/usr/lib/btsync-common/btsync-core --config//// (c) 2013-2014 BitTorrent Inc.//// This btsync configuration file features the complete set of// commented configuration directives//// DAEMON_UID=iamadmin// DAEMON_UMASK=000// DAEMON_NICE=10{  "device_name": "blabla",  "listening_port" : 0, // 0 - randomize port  "check_for_updates" : false,  "display_new_version": false,  "disk_low_priority" : true,  "lan_encrypt_data" : true,  "rate_limit_local_peers" : true,  "folder_rescan_interval" : 86400,  "folder_defaults.delete_to_trash" : true,  "folder_defaults.use_dht" : false,  "folder_defaults.use_lan_broadcast" : true,  "folder_defaults.use_relay" : true,  "folder_defaults.use_tracker" : true,  "folder_defaults.known_hosts" : "",  "max_file_size_for_versioning" : 2,  "sync_trash_ttl" : 365,  "storage_path" : "/share/.btsync",  "use_upnp" : true,  "download_limit" : 0,  "upload_limit" : 0,  "webui" :  {    "listen" : "192.168.0.13:8888" // remove field to disable WebUI  ,"login" : "blub"  ,"password" : "lalala"  ,"force_https" : true // disable http  ,"ssl_certificate" : "/etc/btsync/blabla.crt"  ,"ssl_private_key" : "/etc/btsync/blabla.key"  ,"directory_root" : "/share/"  }}

@RomanZ:

yeah, I never measured it but 10 hours sounds about right from what I remember when it did the initial indexing.

The indexings occuring on every restart only take about 2 minutes though. RAM usage of btsync is 15% according to htop, so the whole system with owncloud and btsync takes up about 250MB of RAM. Don't know how many files are in the sync folders, though. How can I find out via the ssh terminal?

But according to these numbers, I don't think atte's problem are the file numbers, with half the GB it can't be much more files, if they are not all very small.

Edited by elvenbone
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Oh, I only have around 120400 files. So maybe it is really just the number of files that's atte's problem.

 

@atte:

If you go for the BananaPi and want to use SATA, be careful about the SATA power connector. Ground and +5V are swapped on the board for some reason no one knows, so you either need to buy a cable specifically for BananaPi or use any other cable and swap the two wires on the connector. Or just stick to USB like on the raspberry...

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  • 5 months later...

 

 

That's what I just bought to replace my Pi. The Pi can SYNC all right, but when I formatted my PC I had to pull all the data down... OMG.... SO SLOW! 70GB of data was going to take WEEKS. So I decided to go with a faster device. Hopefully it'll arrive soon. I've seen from other posts that the Banana Pi runs laps around the RPi original. I was debating getting the BPi M2, but I was speaking with people and it was pretty decided that it doesn't run Linux too well, but Android yes... And I DON'T want an Android server! Yuck...

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Speaking of Android. What about using a cheap smartphone as a "server"? With a big SDcard it would at least be a very low power device...

I thought about that, but the phone goes into sleep mode... Also, no .SyncArchive for versioning or history. I have 2 tablets and a phone with which I tried. 

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The good news (about the Pi) is that the Pi 2 is much faster. Per-core performance is usually 1.5 to 2 times better and since it is quad core it performs much better on multi-threaded or multi-process workloads:

 

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-model-b/performance-improvements

 

As a bonus, it has 1GB of RAM, rather than 512MB. I am currently upgrading my BTSync node (currently downloading the Cortex A7-compatible kernel).

Edited by iswrong
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