Introduction: Ultimately Serious Bus (USB) NAS Server Powered by Raspberry Pi:)
The true story of a cookie jar's afterlife
Step 1: Eat Some Cookies, Share the Rest With Others :)
Step 2: Cut Out a Large Enough Whole on the Back Side, Where Wires Can Come Out
Unfortunately these tin boxes are really thin :) No good for nice jigsaw work
Step 3: Place the Raspberry Pi in a Case
Step 4: Insert an at Least 8GB Micro SD Card
Step 5: Insert Wifi Adapter
Step 6: Get Some External Hard Drives and Place Them in the Box
Step 7: Key Learning: Even If the External USB Drive Has No Adapter, You Will Need to Install a Powered USB Hub to Make the Thing Work
Step 8: Plug All Hard Drives Into the Powered USB Hub
Step 9: When the Whole Thing Starts to Look Like a Power Plant, You Are on the Right Track
Step 10: Another Key Learning: LAN Speed Is Still Better Than Wifi
So install a LAN cable as well, plug into the router as well
Step 11: Plug Every Adapter Into the Power Socket
Step 12: Install Various Software
Install various software, such as:
Raspbian: The OS for the Raspberry Pi
Putty on your computer: To access your Raspberry from your laptop in command line
XDRP: To remote control your Raspberry in GUI from your laptop
LAMP server: To turn your Raspberry into a webserver, run websites, web based software packages
Samba: To turn your computer into a file server, which you can access from Windows File Explorer (very slow connection, compared to other solutions like FTP)
FTP server: Vsftpd (works pretty well)
A cloud software: There are many I tried, below are my personal experiences:
Cloud Nimbus: Has no Android phone app, but pretty nice
Owncloud: Very feature rich, but very slow
Tonido: Quick, easiest to install, but many times features just stopped working
Seafile: Pretty cool, relatively easy to install and stable, but very hard to mount external drives
Pydio: Finally I stayed with this. Hard to figure out how to install because documentations on the internet are limited, but very nice GUI and various ways how you can connect a drive