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raspberry-pi intermediate 30 min

Raspberry Pi: serve files on your network with Samba

Turn a Raspberry Pi into a small NAS by setting up Samba file sharing. Access the Pi's files from any computer on your network.

Code available for: Python
Published Aug 4, 2026

A Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive attached and Samba running is the smallest useful NAS. It will not compete with a Synology, but for a few hundred GB of family photos and a place for backups to land, it is perfect.

This tutorial walks through installing Samba, configuring a shared folder, and accessing it from Windows, macOS, and Linux.

What you need

  • Raspberry Pi (4 or 5 recommended; the older ones work but are slow for large file transfers)
  • USB hard drive or SSD (an SSD is faster; a USB 3 enclosure is what you want)
  • Powered USB hub if the drive needs more than 1.2 A

Step 1: mount the drive

Plug in the drive. Find its device name:

lsblk

You will see something like:

sda      8:0    0   1.8T  0 disk
└─sda1   8:1    0   1.8T  0 part

/dev/sda1 is the partition. Format it as ext4 (Linux-native; best performance) or NTFS (if you need Windows compatibility):

sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "storage" /dev/sda1

Mount it:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/storage
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/storage
sudo chown -R brian:brian /mnt/storage

Make the mount persistent across reboots. Get the drive’s UUID:

sudo blkid /dev/sda1

Note the UUID="..." value. Add to /etc/fstab:

UUID=your-uuid-here  /mnt/storage  ext4  defaults,noatime  0  2

Test:

sudo umount /mnt/storage
sudo mount -a

If the mount comes back, the fstab entry is right.

Step 2: install Samba

sudo apt install -y samba samba-common-bin

The default config starts Samba as a service. We will overwrite the config in a moment.

Step 3: configure the share

Back up the default config:

sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.bak

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf. Replace the whole thing with:

[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   server string = Pi NAS
   security = user
   map to guest = bad user
   dns proxy = no

[storage]
   path = /mnt/storage
   browseable = yes
   writable = yes
   read only = no
   guest ok = no
   create mask = 0644
   directory mask = 0755
   valid users = brian

workgroup = WORKGROUP is the default Windows workgroup. Change if yours is different.

Step 4: add your user to Samba

Samba has its own password database (separate from the system password):

sudo smbpasswd -a brian

Enter a password. This is the password you will use when connecting from other computers.

Step 5: restart Samba

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Step 6: connect from another computer

Windows:

  1. Open File Explorer
  2. Type \\pi-pihole.local\storage in the address bar
  3. Enter username brian and the Samba password
  4. (Optional) Right-click the share and “Map network drive” for permanent access

macOS:

  1. Finder >> Go >> Connect to Server
  2. Enter smb://pi-pihole.local/storage
  3. Enter username and password
  4. The share appears in Finder under Locations

Linux:

sudo apt install -y cifs-utils
sudo mount -t cifs //pi-pihole.local/storage /mnt/remote -o username=brian,password=your-samba-password

Or use the GNOME/KDE file manager’s “Connect to Server” option.

Performance

A Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB 3 SSD can do about 100 MB/s read and 50 MB/s write over gigabit ethernet. A USB 3 HDD is bottlenecked at about 100 MB/s by the drive itself. A USB 2 drive tops out at about 30 MB/s.

For most home uses (file backups, photo storage), this is more than enough. If you need 1 GB/s, you need a real NAS.

Accessing from outside the home network

For most people, do not. Exposing Samba to the internet is a bad idea. If you need remote access, set up a VPN (WireGuard is the easy pick) or use Tailscale for a peer-to-peer VPN with no port forwarding.

The WireGuard setup is in the book Self-Hosted with Raspberry Pi.

Backing up the share

The whole point of a NAS is having backups. Two layers:

Local backup (rsync to a second drive):

rsync -av /mnt/storage/ /mnt/storage-backup/

Offsite backup (rsync to a cloud storage provider):

rclone sync /mnt/storage/ remote:my-bucket/backup/

rclone supports Google Drive, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, S3, and many more.

When the share is slow

  • Network bottleneck. If you are on Wi-Fi, switch to ethernet. Large file transfers over Wi-Fi are 5-10x slower than ethernet.
  • Drive bottleneck. A USB 2 drive tops out at about 30 MB/s. Check with hdparm -t /dev/sda1.
  • Pi bottleneck. The Pi 4 has USB 3. The Pi 3 has USB 2 (max 30 MB/s). An SSD on USB 3 is much faster.

What to build next

  • A Plex media server (uses the same share).
  • A photo backup script that runs when your phone joins the Wi-Fi.
  • An automatic rsync to a cloud backup service.

The Plex server is in the book Self-Hosted with Raspberry Pi. The photo backup is one of the next tutorials on this site.