raspberry pi 3 model B

[hate]

anyone have any experience with running raspberry. I am looking at possibly doing two of them, one with onboard SD, to stream one movie at a time type thing, and then another for a data server for pictures/music.

Anyone have any thoughts? are they worth the money? Have any good case builds? Do torrents work well on them. I do have a little bit of experience with ubuntu server so I know I would put the ubuntu image instead of the default raspberry repo.

Anyone have a good HD idea for the system?

Thanks

 

[itsfulloftuna]

I have experiences with rPi's. Currently, I have three of them. The rPi B+, the rPi 2, and the rPi 3. You will have to have some type of SD or USB storage for both of them, as the swap and OS will run on that. With the processing power, people have run OpenElec, XBMC and even Kodi projects on them. I hear that Plex runs great on the rPi3's because of the hardware. You can get great single card cases, there are literally hundreds of them out there. I personally run 2 of them in a modded Geaux dogbone stacked case (modeed because the bottom rung is a Hummingboard i2ex).

Your setup is ideal, however, keep in mind that even a properly configured SMB server for dumping pictures/files to will still net you around 9-13 MB/s max. They are 10/100 ports. If it doesn't bother you to "set it and forget it" when transferring large files or large amounts of files, then you should be fine.

I have not set up torrenting on them for this reason, but have the gear and the know how to do so. I do have a webserver that is set up internally to RSS feed my current running torrent status. Additionally, if you are looking at setting up something to store pictures, I suggest looking into ownCloud.

Some links of interest:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=145921
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnC9I8K7T2Y[/ame]

Overall, it's a nice cheap solution for a media player/emulation station.