Rapoo E2700 + My Book Live NAS = Candy for my RPi

I realized that I was forced to do something about my Raspberry Pi setup. Every time I were about to use it, I had to use about 30 minutes to get it working before I could enjoy a movie.

First of all, the only media storage I had were my 16GB USB flash drive, so already after a month, I had to clean up my movies to make space for new ones. Second, if the Raspberry had been shut’ed down or rebooted without a active screen, I had to reboot it again with an active screen to get the picture.

Therefore I decided to rethink my setup. I dropped the flash drive as storage and bought a 3TB My Book Live NAS, dropped Raspbmc for XBian, and I bought a new wireless ultra compact/slim keyboard, Rapoo E2700 (Cheap and pretty nice!). And finally did I add some small and simple tweaks to my Raspberry and now everything works pretty sweet.

I know some people won’t call Western Digital’s My Book Live for a NAS, but why should I spend more money than my needs require?
The primary idea behind a NAS, were a place to store my files (documents, images, old webpages etc.), because I’m planning to get rid of my desktop computer. But I also wanted some kind of backup solution. And I didn’t want to relay on a RAID setup, and therefore is my goal to get two MBL’s, and place the other one at my parents house, and with some software called RSYNC, make sure that all my files are located both on my own MBL, and the one located at my parents. But right now, I only have one, and I’m still testing it before the big backup plan! When it’s time for a second one, and I have RSYNC up and running, I’ll bring a new post with the experience about that and how I configured it.

So right now, I only use my NAS as local backup, torrent client and for storing media for my Raspberry Pi. If you want to know you to install transmission on your My Book Live follow this guide.

When I had to reinstall my Raspberry, I decided to switch to XBian instead of Raspbmc. Why? To try something new, and because the “internet” spoke good about it. Also should the development team of XBian have more members, and are therefore able to bring more and more useful updates. And so far, I’m glad for XBian.

I added the following tweaks to the configuration file of the Pi (Just Google each setting if you want more details):

arm_freq=840
core_freq=275
gpu_mem_256=128
sdram_freq=400
over_voltage=0
disable_overscan=1
disable_splash=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

Rapoo E2700 Wireless Keyboard

I were also looking for a nice and tiny keyboard, which I could use when I had do keyboard stuff on the Raspberry, without moving my desktop keyboard every time. Then I felt over the Rapoo E2700 keyboard, which is a very small and wireless keyboard. It only costs about 50$ and it works just out of the box, even with the Raspberry! You only have to plug the small USB dongle in the Raspberry, and wolla! it works!  On the keyboard there is a small switch, so you easily can turn the keyboard on and off, to safe the battery.

I haven’t used it so much yet, because the Raspberry have been running flawless since the last reboot. And for normal operation, Yatse (Mobile APP) is doing just great!

And now, the next big thing, is SONOS, but more about that later 🙂