[Need Help] Setting up a NAS & download server

[TheDarkMonster62]

Hi ,

I am a beginner to raspberry and i would like to make a NAS server to access files (for example to play 720p movies) and also to make the pi a download server , i have heard that you can make your pi download files at night instead of using your computer.
I have seen multiples way to do NAS but i can't figure out which one is the "best" in my case.

Thanks for reading

[tpyo kingg]

More details about your plans would help. There are a lot of options but some may not be "best" or even "good" for your planned use-cases. Will it just be in-house, or over the net and far away? Do you want just streaming, torrents, or plain old file sharing from a mounted drive?

Without knowing more, but focusing on the streaming, a random guess might be that VideoLAN (VLC) might be one option:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html
https://www.videolan.org/streaming-features.html

Icecast might be another:
http://icecast.org/faq/

[TheDarkMonster62]

Thanks for your quick response.
I want to be just in-house and maybe one time i'll make it over the net just to test but just for testing purposes .
I want to share files from a mounted drive and download torrents on the same PI , would it be possible ?

[tpyo kingg]

For in-house file sharing Samba is popular (SMB/CIFS), and legacy operating systems can work with it out of the box. However, to make that accessible over the net you'd use a VPN such as OpenVPN because it cannot be exposed safely to the open net.

Another way, would be to use SFTP for file sharing and take advantage of built-in SFTP clients like Nautilus or specialized ones like sshfs or others. That would work the same whether locally over the LAN or over the Internet, but some legacy operating systems might need special software added.

A third way would be to install Nextcloud. The prerequisites will be challenging to organize but once it is in place it is rather easy. It would work fine over the LAN just as it would over the net. No additional software would be needed since it operates via the browser. Though some smartphone applications seem to be available too.

There are several packages which provide torrenting capabilities. One popular example is called Transmission and it has several variants. You could easily run that on the RPi concurrently with Samba, it uses really very little of the system's resources beyond disk storage.

[TheDarkMonster62]

Thanks for your reply !