Hi everybody!
Have you any experience of syncthing on Raspberry Pi ?
Could it run correctly on Raspberry A+ (1 core 1Gh and 256Mo) ?
Thank you.
Please use the search, that topic already popped up several times. If there is anything left, feel free to rejoin here. 
Short answer: it’s a stupid idea, even tough it might work within certain limitations. I’ve been there, done that and I can tell you the following: Don’t use the A+. If you want to share less than ~100gb with files on average beeing at least a few megabytes in size, that might work well with the newer Raspberries with several cores an 1GB RAM. But the main Problem I encountered was that somewhere between a few days and 2-3 weeks the USB connection would break and I’d have to manually unmount and remount the storage. It got so annoying that I wrote a script to do this, but the whole thing was very finnicky and basically broken by design.
You should definately get a device with an SATA or eSATA port and use this. If you insist on using a single board computer, you can try the ODROID or Bananapi devices, even tough I’d generally advise against it, if they need their own linux kernel. That’s because you’ll only be able to install the officially supported linux distributions on those, which are often badly maintained and not updated when security issues are found. I’m not sure if the ones mentioned do need custom kernels, but if they do, don’t use them.
A solution that’s more stable, powerful, easier to maintain yet ultimately only a little bit more expensive would be something like the ZBOX series from Zotac. You can install a regular debian or your favorite distribution or even use the supplied windows. I like the fanless devices:
You can obviously try any other cheap x86 boxes from newegg, but the hardware support for linux might not be great.
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Chipping in: I run an ODROID-C1, with arch linux (archlinuxarm.org) and a USB drive: works flawlessly.
Does the ODROID work with a vanilla kernel or did you need to use an official one/build from source?
I guess with the right combination of USB controllers it might work, but the protocol was never designed to be as robust as the ones actually designed for reliable mass storage. The controller on the older Raspberries was definitely shit and the mount broke with five different external harddrives, each using a different controller.
Third-party kernel, as I said. Dead easy to get running though. I haven’t had a single problem with the USB controller.
running a old model B and a new 2B and never had that problem…
About the question: yes it will run, depending on how much you sync the performance will be lousy so if you are thinking about buying one for syncthing: don’t (except it’s just some text files), get something faster. (pi2 is fine in my opinion, but still depends on how much data you sync)
Interesting, my 6 v1 model B Pis all had that exact problem, even with five different USB controllers used in the external harddrives.
When did you start using them with USB storage? I got some of the first devices available in the European market and ran them until ~mid 2014 with Raspbian and Syncthing. Maybe I got a “monday” batch, or it was a software problem which was fixed before you tried it.
I started using USB storage around that time (around may 2014), first a 32GB flash drive, now also two different hard disks with external power supply so maybe it was a software problem that is fixed now
Yeah that’s probably it then. I also only tried the v2 B version out of curiosity about the hashing performance for a day or two. The problems I had regarding USB storage were with several old v1 B pis.
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