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I'm considering the purchase of this external hard-drive to mount on my raspberry pi :

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src : https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Desktop-External-Drive/dp/B00JT8AJZ0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1544379045&sr=8-3&keywords=western+digital

Apologies for such a basic question but there should be no issue using this drive with 'Raspbian Stretch with desktop' and sharing it's content using the raspberry pi over home network. Note : I'm planning to share the drive using the raspberry pi, not home router.

blue-sky
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    I would buy a disk with an optional external power supply. I have a smaller one and I had problems with the internal Raspberry supply --- not sure it was the power supply, but well... see https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/51615/raspberry-pi-power-limitations – Rmano Dec 10 '18 at 17:32
  • I'm not sure what's an "issue" in your book, could you clarify? For one thing, RPi doesn't have USB 3.0, so you won't get 3.0 transfer speeds. – Dmitry Grigoryev Dec 12 '18 at 09:40

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Raspberry Pi's don't have USB 3.0 so it's going to default to USB 2.0 which is slower, but if you're sharing it over a wireless that's slow anyway, so yes it should work fine. You'll just have USB overhead plus wireless. Do you already know how to share the storage attached to the pi?

T. M.
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  • To share the files, I'm planning to use a simple web server to expose the mounted hard drive. Can you recommend an alternative ? – blue-sky Dec 09 '18 at 19:30
  • There's a wide variety of options, including setting it up for Samba: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/samba-file-server/ which is a Windows protocol, but it used for other things too. NFS is another option. But if you know how to do it the way you planned that may be best. – T. M. Dec 09 '18 at 19:48
  • I plan to use Mac, maybe I need a open new question. If it's raspberry OS formatted then I cannot read same files on Mac ? – blue-sky Dec 09 '18 at 20:08
  • If you use a web interface it will be like downloading from any other website so it doesn't matter what filesystem the drive is formatted as as long as the pi can mount it. If you want the drive to be able to show up in finder on your Mac as a network drive then it needs to be formatted with a filesystem the Mac can understand. Your way will work to get the files to the Mac. – T. M. Dec 09 '18 at 23:45
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    I'd still suggest that unless there's a good reason for needing it connected directly to the Pi that if your router has the abiility to share USB drive of this size that this would be a better solution (faster file transfer - better availability). Connected to the router would still be accessible to the Pi. – Charemer Dec 10 '18 at 10:17