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I want to host a personal cloud server on my network and am currently at a crossroads with hardware requirements for the server. My first thought was spend big bucks on a high performance machine with lots of data storage and memory but then I got to thinking that in terms of pulling data externally from the server, a lower powered machine would perform just as well because the internet connection would be the main bottlneck - never fully able to saturate the resources of either the lower resource server or the higher.
For instance, a rasberry pi with a 2 TB usb hard drive would perform just as well as a server packed with dual xeon CPU's 16 gigs of ram and 2 TB worth of 10000k drives.
Is this true?
Locally, I see there would be an advantage to have the beefy server but remotely I am not so sure.
2If it's on your network, how is it 'cloud'? How is it 'offsite'? How can anyone tell you if your internet connection is the bottleneck if you don't say how fast it is. You could have Google Gigabit Fibre for all we know. What would you be pulling from the server - fast enough to stream DivX? Blu Ray? Copying everything in a month? Copying everything as fast as possible? Syncing but not copying, as fast as possible? How many 10k RPM drives? The rPi+USB would be much much much worse for random reads. – TessellatingHeckler – 2014-03-10T03:03:47.393
Wordage is a little wierd. Its a personal cloud server because I own it and would access it remotely via my web browser in my travels. In this context it would be offsite for me. Currently I have regular broadband from Comcast, 30Mb down and 6Mb up. The server would not be streaming but only syncing with my devices wherever I happen to be – Scandalist – 2014-03-10T03:07:04.470
6Mbits/sec = 0.75MByte/sec that would be a bottleneck for raw transfer out from your house to your devices; USB drive read rate is ~25MByte/sec. But it might also matter what you are syncing - a single hard disk gets to ~100 IO requests/second; if you rsync thousands of small files, rPi processor/memory limits and disk IO limits might slow you down before any files are transferred. Consumer USB drives aren't built for 24/7 use, and there's no server class hardware or RAID disks in the rPi setup, so I wouldn't want to rely on it; an older or low-end server would do for less than 'big bucks'. – TessellatingHeckler – 2014-03-10T03:27:39.970