Local hard drive remote access

[Miss Sissy Princess]

I do have ethernet near by so I might just plug it so I am allowed to have nice things in my life again!

If it's an option, go for it!  Here are some graphs that show the vast difference in speed between gigabit Ethernet and WiFi on the Raspberry Pi boards:




Notes:

• The graphs are not on the same scale, with the Ethernet bargraph topping out at 1000 megabits/second and the WiFi topping out at a mere 120.
  
• The Raspberry Pi boards (at least recent models) use simple planar resonant cavity antennas etched onto the PC board.  No matter how "fancy" your WiFi access point or router, and no matter how high a speed it's advertised to have, you're still going to be limited in speed by the rather simplistic etched-on-board antenna of the Pi.
  

I'm running a Pi-4B with an external USB SSD.  I took some time out of my busy trolling schedule to run this test to share what kind of R/W speed I'm seeing to the moOde shared drive over gigabit Ethernet:

   
About 104 MB/s write and 106 MB/s read (for those who would rather not click the image). That's essentially the same as my RAID 6 NAS with an SSD cache drive.

I have an aluminum case on my Pi-4B that acts as a heatsink:




It also acts as a Faraday cage, significantly attenuating RF needed for WiFi, further reducing range and speed.  It's a spectacularly good case that keeps the Pi-4B running cool with no fans, but I bought it knowing I was going to used hardwired Ethernet.

I hope that you find some of the above useful and I apologize if my prior post, a less than fully successful attempt at humor, caused offense.

[Tim Curtis]

Thats kind of a cool case. Can thermal paste (super thin layer) be used instead of tape or is there a gap between the heat sink contacts and the component surfaces?

[TheOldPresbyope]

This feels like beating a dead horse but since these statements were made

• The Raspberry Pi boards (at least recent models) use simple planar resonant cavity antennas etched onto the PC board.  No matter how "fancy" your WiFi access point or router, and no matter how high a speed it's advertised to have, you're still going to be limited in speed by the rather simplistic etched-on-board antenna of the Pi.
  
• [speaking of the metal case] It also acts as a Faraday cage, significantly attenuating RF needed for WiFi, further reducing range and speed. 
  

I feel it appropriate to point out that there are alternatives. 

For example, one can use 

• a USB-WiFi adapter, perhaps even with an external antenna. RaspiOS devs do a reasonable job keeping up with the drivers for latest-and-greatest adapters (but can only do so if the adapter vendor cares enough about the non-MSWindows market to cooperate).
  
• a WiFi bridge (I re-purpose router/access points for this using DD-WRT or such 'cuz I prefer open-source software). 
  

I've done each in the past when circumstances dictated. Horses for courses, as my British friends would say.

Regards,
Kent

PS - I love irony as a rhetorical device but it doesn't translate well on the InterWeb™. It's hard to distinguish facetiousness from sarcasm and that can make all the difference.

[Miss Sissy Princess]

Thats kind of a cool case. Can thermal paste (super thin layer) be used instead of tape or is there a gap between the heat sink contacts and the component surfaces?

It has a bit too much clearance between the top of the chips and the aluminum columns that extend down (nearly) to them.  I suspect that manufacturing tolerances on the boards,  ICs, and case might be such that it was more prudent to do that than try to engineer tight enough clearances for thermal paste.

I've been extremely happy with the cooling.   The pads are of very high quality and, but they do require some care in placement on the chips.  Tweezers or the tip of an X-acto knife works well in placing them.

Fans are a no-go for me when it comes to a music server, and since I already had an 8-port gigabit Ethernet switch in the room, I could directly cable up Ethernet without having to worry about the attenuation of WiFi (it was still usable for me, but that may be due to the close proximity of the Ubiquiti "Long Range" WiFi Access Point).

I like this case better than the prior one because it has a flat surface on the bottom on which to mount rubber feet.   The other one had ribs on top and bottom, though it didn't cool any better and maybe a bit less well.

[Miss Sissy Princess]

I feel it appropriate to point out that there are alternatives. 

For example, one can use 

• a USB-WiFi adapter, perhaps even with an external antenna. RaspiOS devs do a reasonable job keeping up with the drivers for latest-and-greatest adapters (but can only do so if the adapter vendor cares enough about the non-MSWindows market to cooperate).
  
• a WiFi bridge (I re-purpose router/access points for this using DD-WRT or such 'cuz I prefer open-source software). 
  

I've done each in the past when circumstances dictated. Horses for courses, as my British friends would say.

I've also done both, including using open source firmware for repurposed routers (DD-WRT, OpenWrt, and AsusWrt-Merlin) pressed into service as bridges.  If you absolutely can't get hardwired Ethernet to a moOde server, there are definitely hardware solutions that outperform the antenna-limited WiFi on the Pi computers.  

Of the two, I prefer the external router-as-bridge approach as it uses the standard Pi Ethernet interface, which is fully tested, debugged, supported, etc.  The USB adapters seem to fall into the realm of "great-if-it-works-for-you-but-not-guaranteed."

It's hard to distinguish facetiousness from sarcasm and that can make all the difference.

Me?  Sarcastic?  Perish the thought!

[DRONE7]

Perish the Thought.

Wasn't he the "Great Thinker" and contemporary of Genghis Khan  ??...    

https://www.houseofnames.com/perish-family-crest

[Sehnsucht]

Even with the smiley that a pretty trollish thing to say.

I'm pretty sure that people understood I was kidding.  Plenty of people live in upscale apartments, historic homes, dorms, etc. where drilling holes and running cables isn't an option.

I'm too cheap/lazy to want to do that, plus the wifi in the Raspberry Pi is pretty piss poor - to say nothing of the problem of connecting an ethernet cable to a Pi Zero W. My solution was to use ethernet-over-lan from the router elsewhere in the house to a mains socket in the same room as the Pi, and connect that to an unused old modem/router from a previous broadband contract.

[Miss Sissy Princess]

I'm too cheap/lazy to want to do that, plus the wifi in the Raspberry Pi is pretty piss poor - to say nothing of the problem of connecting an ethernet cable to a Pi Zero W. My solution was to use ethernet-over-lan from the router elsewhere in the house to a mains socket in the same room as the Pi, and connect that to an unused old modem/router from a previous broadband contract.

It's great that a Pi Zero W can run moOde, but the modest $25 delta between a Pi Zero W and a Pi 4B makes the Pi 4B the only choice for me (I don't want to nickel and dime this to death; so let's skip the 'I can power the Zero W with my old phone charger' type of stuff). 

For that $25, I get gigabit Ethernet and an order of magnitude higher computing performance, and that makes a huge, real-world difference in everything from moOde GUI responsiveness to music library updates.  





(the above from The MagPi Magazine:  https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/r...benchmarks)

Again, I'm only writing based on my priorities and budget.  I'm not looking down on anyone who, for whatever reason, simply can't afford or justify the higher cost of a Pi 4 moOde build.  But if the cost isn't a barrier, there are some very strong arguments to be made in favor of going with a Pi 4B over a Zero W.

Note:  The pair of graphs I included were just to give a very general sense of the differences in computing power between the Pi Zero W and the Pi 4B.  I'm not suggesting that either, or both, are exactly predictive of moOde performance on each of the boards.

[prs999]

Hi,

Thanks, I ill give it a quick test first.

I normally only upload a couple of albums at once so it should be ok, if I ever need to rebuild the whole library i'll just pop out the drive out and plug it in directly.

I do have ethernet near by so I might just plug it so I am aloud to have nice things in my life again!

I just need to work out a power button kind of thing now, thankfully theres plenty of advice about that on the web

Like this...
https://howchoo.com/g/mwnlytk3zmm/how-to...spberry-pi

That looks like the ticket, so when the PI in in 'HALT' state what would the power consumption be?

Thanks

[Sehnsucht]

I'm too cheap/lazy to want to do that, plus the wifi in the Raspberry Pi is pretty piss poor - to say nothing of the problem of connecting an ethernet cable to a Pi Zero W. My solution was to use ethernet-over-lan from the router elsewhere in the house to a mains socket in the same room as the Pi, and connect that to an unused old modem/router from a previous broadband contract.

It's great that a Pi Zero W can run moOde, but the modest $25 delta between a Pi Zero W and a Pi 4B makes the Pi 4B the only choice for me (I don't want to nickel and dime this to death; so let's skip the 'I can power the Zero W with my old phone charger' type of stuff). 

For that $25, I get gigabit Ethernet and an order of magnitude higher computing performance, and that makes a huge, real-world difference in everything from moOde GUI responsiveness to music library updates.  

I can afford a Pi 4; that's what my home system uses.  The $25 delta is pretty much what paid for the DAC, SD card etc in this system:
http://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.p...6#pid35606
I use an external Android mdp client to control it, as the moOde GUI isn't very good on a small screen, and there is absolutely no difference to moOde's responsiveness between the Pi 4 and Pi Zero when controlling it this way.   Using the larger Pi (an earlier version of this portable used a Pi 3 I had lying around) is just a lot less portable, and simply requires too much lego.

And I can power the Pi Zero W with my old phone charger.