Can I use a USB external drive as a music server?

mwddrwg

tavernman wrote: »

You don't say which Radio, nor do you say whether it is regularly switched off, nor what you are using to stream from your PC. Switch one or more of them off it will take time to re-build the indices especially the radio ...just a guess of course since you haven't given much info

This is exactly what happens now. It is switched off (standby) every day so switching on again means reconnecting to the network and loading the indeces again. Maybe I should leave it on full time? The radio is a cheap Magicbox but has suprisingly good sound.


I'm using a normal PC with Windows 7 to store and share the music, connected wirelessly to the hub. I think this is why the indeces take more time to load than previously when it was connected via ethernet to another hub we used to operate before moving to BT Infinity.


We live in a not-spot so used to have a village wifi solution coming in via an aerial on the house which came in close to the PC. Now it's via the phone line which comes in to the house downstairs so can't be moved/extended without more hassle.

gjchester

mwddrwg wrote: »

In the meantime I might try plugging in the USB drive into the hub anyway and see if the internet radio can see the folders (BT HH5). Probably not, but you never know. Bit nervous however as there have been incidents I heard about when researching this yesterday of the hub totalling USB drives plugged in as the power is too much for it from that port. Will keep you updated on progress. Cheers all

If your unsure, put a bunch of tunes on a USB stick and use that to see if it works, rather than risk your entire collection while trying it out...

If an external drive needs more than 500mAH that a USB can supply then it normally comes with a power brick...

mwddrwg

Good idea. Will do that. My external drive is a 500GB Seagate one without a seperate PSU so hopefully should be OK. Fingers crossed

enfield_freddy

Late last night I decided to check out if the information and links I passed on to mwddrwg were good.


A few weeks ago it was my sons birthday and we upgraded his old Raspberry Pi for one of the new Pi2 models .


I claimed the old (one of the first made) Pi s back off him


using an old sd card I followed the links on youtube , and had a fully working nas drive within about 20 mins , however some Linux knolage and typing is involved .


Plan 2: (I like this one)


if someone writes a working shell , use it!


I downloaded a copy of "openelec" which is the xbmc media centre programme , copied the files to the sd card and booted.


a couple of simple setup questions were asked , I did not need to change any , as I,m not going to be using the programme.




with the Pi booted , yup not even connected to the tv , just sat in the corner with a usb power lead and a Ethernet cable , I could see the thing on my computer


Plan b: part 2


Linux cannot see a ntfs drive , it can see fat32 and ext3 or 4 , however windoze decides your drive must be NTFS , cue a free programme "mini partition magic 9" , download run and reformat your USB frive to fat32 or one of the ext formats and label it "xxx"


if you use fat32 , you are tied to a max file size of 4 gig


I plugged the drive into the PI , fastened them together with an elastic band , and booted it


there on my computer was the Pi complete with a folder called "xxx"


I could then copy files via Ethernet to the folder (and indeed remove them)


the thing streams quite well , the 512m memory one might be better , or even the 1g memory one the Pi is about 700 MHz , that's on par with my dlink nas drive




so for the cost of a secondhand Pi , a 8 gig memory card and a phone PSU , cheep nas time .

Fightsback

enfield_freddy wrote: »

Linux cannot see a ntfs drive , it can see fat32 and ext3 or 4 , however windoze decides your drive must be NTFS , cue a free programme "mini partition magic 9" , download run and reformat your USB frive to fat32 or one of the ext formats and label it "xxx"

Linux can read and write to NTFS:

NTFS-3G

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfs-3g/

NTFS read only support has been built into the kernel for a very long time.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/9272f2dc3956c6b6c4335de51bc897fa3b981584/fs/ntfs

enfield_freddy

very possibly , however that does not seem to be one of the options to format a drive in the currant windows editions or indeed in the partition tool I suggested , please elaborate as to which commonly available (free) PC programme offers this choise , as I would like to try this method out.


*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS-3G , cant see windows listed there , and can see a bad comment already


"Benchmarks show that the driver's performance via FUSE is comparable to that of other filesystems' drivers in-kernel,[8] provided that the CPU is powerful enough. On embedded or old systems, the high processor usage can severely limit performance.[9] Current versions often show 100% CPU utilization on dealing with big files on fragmented NTFS file systems.[10] Also, caching support is very poor."


however the other 2 options I stated seem to work well , and or corse if you format in fat32 , you can use the drive in a conventional PC if needed

enfield_freddy

ok to add , "fightsback" , you suggest ntfs-3g , how do you do this on a PC.

Fightsback

enfield_freddy wrote: »

very possibly , however that does not seem to be one of the options to format a drive in the currant windows editions or indeed in the partition tool I suggested , please elaborate as to which commonly available (free) PC programme offers this choise , as I would like to try this method out.


*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS-3G , cant see windows listed there , and can see a bad comment already


"Benchmarks show that the driver's performance via FUSE is comparable to that of other filesystems' drivers in-kernel,[8] provided that the CPU is powerful enough. On embedded or old systems, the high processor usage can severely limit performance.[9] Current versions often show 100% CPU utilization on dealing with big files on fragmented NTFS file systems.[10] Also, caching support is very poor."


however the other 2 options I stated seem to work well , and or corse if you format in fat32 , you can use the drive in a conventional PC if needed

Works fine for me sitting here using opensuse

PS never quote wikipedia as it's often woefully out of date and full of inaccuracies. Those points on CPU utilization etc are from 6 year old bug reports, NTFS-3g has moved on a lot since those early days.

For a Pi there are some instructions here on automounting NTFS drives:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspbery-Pi-Wireless-Auto-Sorting-NASMedia-Server/step1/Automount-USB-hard-disks-ntfs-3g/

enfield_freddy

ok thanks for adding a suggestion that the average windows user can,t use


until you can link us to a freeware program that works on win 7 or win 8 , I think we can forget your idea.


any other off the wall ideas , or do you want us all to set up a separate machine and learn Linux just to format a hard drive?


your input into this thread has caused nothing but confusion

Fightsback

enfield_freddy wrote: »

ok thanks for adding a suggestion that the average windows user can,t use


until you can link us to a freeware program that works on win 7 or win 8 , I think we can forget your idea.


any other off the wall ideas , or do you want us all to set up a separate machine and learn Linux just to format a hard drive?


your input into this thread has caused nothing but confusion

1) Don't be so rude or you will forever live in ignorance

2 ) State what exactly you are trying to achieve

3 ) You made the incorrect assertion that Linux cannot deal with NTFS

4 ) if you are just looking for an argument then go here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y