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I have a mybooklive and although it has a lot of storage it comes with a slow cpu and just 256mb of ram.

I was wondering if adding a PI in the mix would give me more speed. I mounted the NAS and I can see it over SSH on the Pi.

Right now I am thinking maybe taking the HDDs out of the NAS and putting them in a USB enclosure that I attach directly to the PI.

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  • And where does that leave the mybooklive then?
    – Bex
    Commented Nov 21, 2015 at 11:42

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Using the Pi in place of your MyBookLive would be a poor choice. While the RPi can function as a NAS, it is not designed primarily for that purpose. A couple factors make the NAS the better choice.

  1. The MyBookLive is dedicated. It's not doing anything other than HDD I/O, and network requests. 256MB of RAM may seem small considering the RPi's 1GB, but it doesn't have features that require more RAM. Increasing the specs would cost money, and would probably deliver little, if any, benefit.

  2. The MyBookLive probably has the proper I/O connectors. My guess is that your NAS has a proper SATA connector to interface with its HDD. The RPi would be limited to a USB converter, which would be significantly slower.

  3. The Raspberry Pi's Ethernet and USB share a controller hub. This will further slow down your connection to the device if it's connected through the RPi

tldr: I'd stick with the dedicated NAS device.

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  • What about using a PI as a DLNA or PLEX server? The mybooklive has some dlna features but I suspect the indexing is slowing it down.
    – Jason Mirk
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 17:41
  • I don't actually have any experience setting it up as a specific DLNA server. I have setup a MyBookLive for a family member though, and I'd be surprised if the RPi provided a substantially different network speed. If you're interested in trying, I'd suggest finding a cheap HDD and using that, rather than destroying the NAS.
    – Jacobm001
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 17:48

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