Ultimately Serious Bus (USB) NAS Server Powered by Raspberry Pi:)

The true story of a cookie jar's afterlife

Eat Some Cookies, Share the Rest With Others :)

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

Place the Raspberry Pi in a Case

Insert an at Least 8GB Micro SD Card

Insert Wifi Adapter

Get Some External Hard Drives and Place Them in the Box

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

Plug All Hard Drives Into the Powered USB Hub

When the Whole Thing Starts to Look Like a Power Plant, You Are on the Right Track

Another Key Learning: LAN Speed Is Still Better Than Wifi

So install a LAN cable as well, plug into the router as well

Plug Every Adapter Into the Power Socket

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

Ultimately Serious Bus (USB) NAS Server Powered by Raspberry Pi:)