Raspberry Pi - Dedicated low power downloader

[DJMK4]

Hi all,

I am asking for a specific piece of advice, I am after a small low powered unit (thinking a Rasp Pi) to use as a downloader

Basically I have recently moved out of a family home where I purchased 80/20 rated FTTC and moved to a location (shared household) which has a 2.5mb connection and no FTTC at the local cab.

I was thinking of attaching a Rasp pi at my family home to do my downloading, then transferring it to my work machine (will be limited to 17mb) and stick on a USB drive.

Its an annoying way of doing it but that's all I can do at the moment.

With the Raspberry Pi, would this be an ok downloader box? my throughput at family home would be roughly about 60-65mb down.

I was looking at using an OS on the Pi that would allow me to install a torrent and NZB client, although probably wont use them both at the same time.

Attached to the Pi I would need to attach a powered USB drive for storage.

I would then need some way of setting up the Pi as an FTP server, which I can connect to from work to transfer the files, again would this be possible? and would the Pi be OK transferring this over the internet to get best throughput

Or would it be best to scrap the Pi and get a cheap PC?

 

[Uhtred]

I would just transfer the files over SSH to your work PC with file zilla for example. Port 22 is not often blocked.

To do so you need to at the very least change the default password for the pi user or ideally setup an SSL cert.

I doubt you'll get the full speed downloading torrents, the ethernet port runs over usb for a start but it should be better than 2.5 down!

 

[kayomani]

It would work however you would not get spectacular speeds, I think when I tried torrents with my PI it never went above 300Kbps and due to CPU use. Do not be tempted to try the higher overclocks as if you are transferring lots of data you'll likely end up corruption.

 

[korgtronix]

I set something similar up for my parents using a RPi and a power USB hard drive on their Virgin 60mb connection. They can hit 3MBps but the speeds are inconsistent and as they also use it to stream movies to their media centre its not the greatest. It will work but you will not see great speeds especially if you download and upload at the same time.

 

[DJMK4]

Hmm, think I will give this a miss then

Indecently I have just picked up a Dell 755 SFF PC 2Ghz dual core, 2GB ram and HDD for £25 which I will be using instead