I'm completely new to Raspberry Pi and am a somewhat technical person but don't have much experience with setting up something like this, but have some questions about a couple things.
I've got my Pi 4 setup and working fine on Raspbian with Homebridge and so far it seems nearly flawless compared to when I tried to do the same thing last year on my iMac. Not sure if the software is better or what, but I love the web UI for Homebridge now.
Anyway, I've got a 4TB and 6TB external WD USB 3.0 drives that I'd like to hook up to it that are formatted ExFAT, and one has a macOS Extended partition for Time Machine. Will I be able to get these working with the Pi or will I need to format them to something else? Is there a guide that someone can point me to that explains how to do everything step by step to set it up as a file server? My initial searches were kinda all over the place. If I have to drop support for the Time Machine, that's fine, and I have a spare drive that I could potentially keep around and plug into my iMac when I want to run backups for that.
I figured a Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM should be enough to handle things which is why I went for more RAM, though I thought 8GB seemed like overkill. Just didn't want to be limited. It won't be a heavy duty file server as it will mainly be for archival storage when I need to get some old photos or project or move old stuff off my iMac so the drive won't fill up. I'll probably only use it a couple times a week to grab things here and there, but when I do dump stuff to it in bulk off my SSDs (maybe once every month or two) it can be a couple hundred gigs at a time when I take a lot of 42MP RAW photos that I want to back up.
With the case and fan I have ($99 Canakit from Amazon) the fan is kinda loud. I switched it from the 5V pins to the 3.3V pins and that reduced it by 15dB, but things are really quiet in my studio and I can still usually hear it over the fans in my iMac even though it's twice as far. I might route an ethernet cable into a closet at some point to set it up there, but can anyone recommend good 30x30mm fans that are really quiet? The current one is 7nm deep but it might go up to 10mm. Right now just running HomeBridge it stays around 115F most of the time on the slower fan speed. Is that good? I also have some little heat sinks on the chips. Without the fan it's in the low 120s. With the fan on 5V it's around 105F. But like I mentioned above, I'm also wanting to turn it into a file server, so I think eventually it will need the cooling cranked back up for that. Does it exist? Everything I see online looks like copies of the one I have and seem really inexpensive ($5-$8). I'd be willing to spend $25 or so on a really quiet, efficient little fan though.
Thanks!
I've got my Pi 4 setup and working fine on Raspbian with Homebridge and so far it seems nearly flawless compared to when I tried to do the same thing last year on my iMac. Not sure if the software is better or what, but I love the web UI for Homebridge now.
Anyway, I've got a 4TB and 6TB external WD USB 3.0 drives that I'd like to hook up to it that are formatted ExFAT, and one has a macOS Extended partition for Time Machine. Will I be able to get these working with the Pi or will I need to format them to something else? Is there a guide that someone can point me to that explains how to do everything step by step to set it up as a file server? My initial searches were kinda all over the place. If I have to drop support for the Time Machine, that's fine, and I have a spare drive that I could potentially keep around and plug into my iMac when I want to run backups for that.
I figured a Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM should be enough to handle things which is why I went for more RAM, though I thought 8GB seemed like overkill. Just didn't want to be limited. It won't be a heavy duty file server as it will mainly be for archival storage when I need to get some old photos or project or move old stuff off my iMac so the drive won't fill up. I'll probably only use it a couple times a week to grab things here and there, but when I do dump stuff to it in bulk off my SSDs (maybe once every month or two) it can be a couple hundred gigs at a time when I take a lot of 42MP RAW photos that I want to back up.
With the case and fan I have ($99 Canakit from Amazon) the fan is kinda loud. I switched it from the 5V pins to the 3.3V pins and that reduced it by 15dB, but things are really quiet in my studio and I can still usually hear it over the fans in my iMac even though it's twice as far. I might route an ethernet cable into a closet at some point to set it up there, but can anyone recommend good 30x30mm fans that are really quiet? The current one is 7nm deep but it might go up to 10mm. Right now just running HomeBridge it stays around 115F most of the time on the slower fan speed. Is that good? I also have some little heat sinks on the chips. Without the fan it's in the low 120s. With the fan on 5V it's around 105F. But like I mentioned above, I'm also wanting to turn it into a file server, so I think eventually it will need the cooling cranked back up for that. Does it exist? Everything I see online looks like copies of the one I have and seem really inexpensive ($5-$8). I'd be willing to spend $25 or so on a really quiet, efficient little fan though.
Thanks!
