Adding an External Disk to a Raspberry Pi and Sharing it Over the Network

The Raspberry Pi isn’t necessarily the best choice for creating a fast and efficient Network Attached Storage (NAS) as any external disk will be attached using USB 2.0 and, at least until the recent arrival of the new Raspberry Pi 3, Model B+, the Pi was limited to 100Mbps over Ethernet.

However, if you intend to use it as a personal server you won’t be dealing with large volumes of traffic, so it can easily be “good enough” to use as reliable, and perhaps critically, really rather cheap network storage…