I have used Raspberry Pi file servers for several years. Of course this means attaching USB storage for files. My Lenovo M73 tiny computer has room for one 2.5″ hard drive which is an SSD with Ubuntu 22.10 Linux and minimal room for file storage. I’ll move 4TB and 5TB USB HDDs from my Raspberry Pi 4 to the M73. I’ll use a new tutorial from LinuxConfig to take me through the steps.

After installing Ubuntu server and updating it, I gave it a permanent ip reservation. My AT&T router only allows for 16 permanent ip reservations and I’ve hit the limit. It looks like some static ip addresses are in my future.

I attached the two USB3 drives to the M73. They will be outside the ProxMox storage pool and dedicated to the file server. To do this I modified the virtual machine to include new hardware. I added a USB passthrough device for each drive. Unfortunately, the M73 supports only one USB3 device so the second HDD will operate at USB2 speeds. On second thought, the two drives will go back on the Raspberry Pi server and a single 12TB USB3 drive will be storage for my file server.

I’m comfortable with the Samba install. It allows Windows computers to map drives to my file server. There’s a couple of other posts describing the Samba install.

Next, something I’m not so comfortable with. I need to share files with a Plex server (Linux) and a Transmission server (Linux). SMB shares are not as efficient as NFS shares that are native to Linux. I’ll again refer to a previous post for the how-to.