Hi Jim,

I think you should be fine. I'm using five rescued HP ePCs all with PIII @800MHz, 128MB RAM and a range of HDs, including one one with 80GB. All connected via a HP ProCurve 1G switch. I have one RPi2 connected to the cluster and it, too, works fine with them. Still having struggles with auth, etc.

For what it's worth, I have an ePC booting off a compact flash card (via an IDE adaptor) - that one is rather slow. I haven't benchmarked this cluster against anything, but my impression is that it's Ok, but a single contemporary PC seems faster (SSD, SATA3, etc)

Well that's one dodgy data point for you!

On 12 October 2016 at 11:33, James A. Robinson <jim.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

Folks,

One of the things I'm thinking about is setting up a full Plan 9
cluster, meaning one of the components would be a stand-alone
fileserver hooked up to a decent amount of storage.

I was wondering what experience people have had with slower or faster
machines in this role?

I was wondering whether or not it'd be feasible to hook up something
like http://tinyurl.com/jgov5gc (Amazon.com) to something small like a
Raspberry Pi 3, or if the I/O would be too much for that kind of
computer to handle.

Does anyone here run a fileserver on a small computer like a
raspberry pi 3, or perhaps something like an Intel nuc?

I wouldn't be supporting multiple users, just myself moving between
a couple of devices.

Jim