Setting up NAS for ROMs and media

construkt

I just put together a little file server with about 7TB of storage. Its specs are currently:

Intel Xeon E3-1230v2
Supermicro X9SCL-F Motherboard
32GB ECC RAM
4TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
3x 1TB WD Green HDD

I currently have an RPi4 with a 16GB SD card and a 1TB SSD hooked up to it to store all of my ROMs.

Now, this was my first attempt at setting up retropie and first time dealing with an RPi at all when I set this thing up. I followed a bunch of guides and was trying to get it to boot directly off of the SSD. I couldn't manage to get that to work, so now the RPi4 boots up into emulationstation and has to sit there forever waiting for the SSD enclosure to stop blinking and I have to restart emulationstation once it's done to get any of the ROMs to show up.

I was wondering if anyone knows if I can set up the server I have built and put the 1TB SSD in it so my retropie box connects to it across the network and is also able to watch movies and TV shows through the Kodi port.

I haven't installed anything on the server yet. The 3 1TB drives already are loaded up with movies and what not because I pulled it from my old HTPC. I haven't picked an OS yet because I don't know which ones would play nice with my retropie box. I've been looking at Windows Storage Server, Unraid, and FreeNAS. I'm thinking I want to avoid FreeNAS because I don't like the idea of ZFS and its inability to keep adding drives.

I'm really not sure whether any of these and their associated file systems are going to make it impossible for the RPi to read or not. As I mentioned initially, the goal is to just have the RPi4 in my living room and let it automatically connect to the NAS where the ROMs are located, and so I can switch over to the Kodi port and watch/listen to the rest of the movies/music/tv shows that are going to be stored on the NAS. I want to ideally be able to put another retropie box in another room as well and do the same thing.

Any suggestions?

mitu

I followed a bunch of guides and was trying to get it to boot directly off of the SSD.

The Pi4 is not able right now to boot off USB only - you'll need a sdcard or do a network boot.

I was wondering if anyone knows if I can set up the server I have built and put the 1TB SSD in it so my retropie box connects to it across the network and is also able to watch movies and TV shows through the Kodi port.

Sure, it sounds possible. You can take a look at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-Network-Share/, that setup is for using the ROM folder through NFS/SMB, but you can similarly mount other folders (media) and make them available locally to either emulation or Kodi.

tpo1990

Nice specs you have there for the NAS.

If you can set up your NAS as a Plex server, you will be able to use the Raspberry Pi 4B as a Plex client through Kodi to watch movies, videos and listen to your music library from the NAS. You just have to install Kodi first on the Raspberry Pi 4B and then install the Kodi Plex addon.

If not then you will be looking at using your NAS as a DLNA server and then the Raspberry Pi 4B with Kodi as the DLNA client.

I use both my Raspberry Pi 3B and the Raspberry Pi 4B as Plex client through Kodi. The NAS is an older Synology. A Synology DS213 with 2x2tb hdd.

Hope it makes sense, otherwise let me know.

construkt

@tpo1990 It was actually pretty cheap to set up. The cpu/mobo/RAM was like $160 and the case was $100. The rest of the stuff, I just kind of had sitting around in other machines haha.

I was considering setting it up as a Plex server with the Kodi addon. I wasn't sure that the Plex addon for Kodi worked within retropie on the RPi 4.

Also, these are all just clients that go on the NAS. Any idea what OS I should be using? I'm leaning heavily towards Unraid now and I wanted to make sure that Retropie/Kodi were not going to have any issues with Btrfs or XFS.

construkt

@mitu Thanks, I have read that article a number of times, and that is what I'm going to try to refer to (if a novice like me can manage it).

I am more concerned about what OS I should be running and whether or not my choice of file system is going to allow me to do it. Unraid uses XFS/Btrfs, WSS uses Btrfs, FreeNAS uses ZFS. Heavily leaning towards Unraid at the moment, but don't want to format all of these drives after moving data around only to find out that they can't be read by other systems.

mitu

@construkt said in Setting up NAS for ROMs and media:

Heavily leaning towards Unraid at the moment, but don't want to format all of these drives after moving data around only to find out that they can't be read by other systems.

Usually that's why you get a NAS, so other systems don't have to read the data directly off the disks. If you do a proper RAID setup, the data will be distributed anyway on different disks.

construkt

@mitu oh okay, so Unraid would deliver the data to the client devices rather than just allow access to the disks?

I'm new to all of this. I've been building my own rigs for 20 years, but never bothered to get into any Linux OS or mess with servers, so I'm kind of tackling it all at once.

I also don't really have the right configuration to run any sort of RAID array off the bat. I just have a ragtag group of drives from an HTPC, my retropie box, and a 4tb drive my buddy gave me. There is nothing terribly critical on the drives anyways, so buying extra drives for parity seems like a bit of a waste, unless a RAID array is a requirement for a NAS.

While I have you here, so you know if there is any way to fix the long delay from starting up my RPi4 to the time that it actually able to access the data on the USB connected SSD? It's an 860 Evo 1TB drive connected via USB 3.0. I thought it would just be able to pick it up immediately but instead I have to wait a few minutes for the enclosure to stop flashing with activity and then restart emulation station. If I don't restart, it will just show that I have no ROMs.

mitu

@construkt said in Setting up NAS for ROMs and media:

@mitu oh okay, so Unraid would deliver the data to the client devices rather than just allow access to the disks?

That's how a NAS works - the client will see some file shares (CIFS/SMB/NFS/AFP), they don't see a disk.

I'm new to all of this. I've been building my own rigs for 20 years, but never bothered to get into any Linux OS or mess with servers, so I'm kind of tackling it all at once.

NAS is not Linux only, they come in a variety of systems, mostly as hardware appliances.

I also don't really have the right configuration to run any sort of RAID array off the bat. I just have a ragtag group of drives from an HTPC, my retropie box, and a 4tb drive my buddy gave me. There is nothing terribly critical on the drives anyways, so buying extra drives for parity seems like a bit of a waste, unless a RAID array is a requirement for a NAS.

It's up to the NAS's software if RAID is required or not, I'm guessing it's not, but usually it's better to have it for safety (replace a faulty drive easily) and for easy expansion of the storage capacity.

While I have you here, so you know if there is any way to fix the long delay from starting up my RPi4 to the time that it actually able to access the data on the USB connected SSD? It's an 860 Evo 1TB drive connected via USB 3.0. I thought it would just be able to pick it up immediately but instead I have to wait a few minutes for the enclosure to stop flashing with activity and then restart emulation station. If I don't restart, it will just show that I have no ROMs.

How much does it take to mount the drive manually - from the command line ?
I'm guessing it's not a few minutes, but it's not negligible enough for it to finish before EmulationStation starts up. See how much it takes, then insert a timeout in the autostart.sh script before the EmulationStation start-up.

tpo1990

@construkt Nice. Well as far as I see it you can choose what ever NAS OS you want since a NAS primary goal is to serve files to clients such as computers on any network through file protocols such as SMB and NFS. It doesn't matter what OS the clients have or what NAS OS you decide to go with as long as both NAS OS and the clients OS supports the correct file protocols.

And as @mitu says it is better to set up a data redundancy environment with RAID. This is also known as mirroring. Lets say you have 2x 2 TB hard drives added to a RAID Mirroring setup, both of the drives will be in the same hard drive volume and they are connected together so if one drive fails you will not lose any data, however this setup will have the cost of making only half of the disk space available. So instead of 4 TB total disk space it will only be 2 TB total but you will be protected if any power cut happens in your home. I have tried this from experience and on my point of view I only needed to buy a new hard drive to match the other to rebuild the volume again.