[clug] Hivemind question: Portable wireless NAS recomendations

[Andrew Steele]

Hi,

Next month I'm doing some travelling overseas.  I'm looking at getting a battery powered wireless NAS to take with me but my research to date has not found anything suitable.  Or rather there are options out there, but reviews suggest all have deficiencies.  I'm throwing this out to see if anyone has any other ideas.

Hardware requirements are:
- 1TB of storage (mainly for storing video footage), don't need an SSD - i.e. spinning rust is OK.
- Wifi hotspot but also wifi "passthrough". i.e. devices can connect to this and then it can connect to the Internet via another wifi connection
- Battery powered - most products give around 5 hours of operation - that's fine.
- Chargeable via a USB port thus battery life can be extended with a USB rechargeable battery.
- USB host port so you can plug USB sticks, cameras, etc into it and copy directly to and from it.  Preferably USB3.0
- Wired ethernet (preferably Gigabit though as this is mainly for Internet access, 100Mb would do).
- Bonus would be 3/4G modem - or at least a second USB port so I can have a USB modem plugged in whilst another USB device is present.
- Can also function as a "dumb" external USB drive.
- Don't need HDMI/video

Software requirements:
- Web sharing
- Samba sharing (I have a Panasonic Lumix camera which can dump straight to a samba share). 
- DNLA server
- Happy for android access to be via an app as long as it isn't the only access method available
- ssh
- rsync
- I don't want something that "helpfully" makes the drive accessible from the cloud, or transparently does that in the background.  Having said that, I wouldn't mind if I can choose to selectively have some stuff sync'ed to dropbox, etc.
- Drive Encryption would be a bonus

Devices I've investigated are:

Corsair Voyager Air - Hardware specs are excellent.  Software is very deficient.  It doesn't have a USB host port.  The SOC needs a NDA so there's little change of a hackable Linux port

Seagate Wireless Plus
Lacie Fuel
	These two lack USB host ports, and wired ethernet, there is alternative firmware available to improve the deficiencies of the standard code but the lack of USB host ports is a problem

PQI Air bank
	No samba and no alternate firmware that I've found.
	
PQI Air drive
Kingston Mobilite
	Both provide a wifi access point, but have no local storage

I'm not adverse to a home-brew solution, but I'm not keen to get into the minutia of figuring out reliable battery requirements for a given configuration.  And as I'll be using it travelling, I don't want a mass of leads that I need to constantly connect up all the time.  If someone can point me at a page where someone has already done the work to get a particular device to work off batteries, I'd be happy with that.

I have considered a raspberrypi but with requirements that are essentially storage IO, I don't think it can provide the throughput.

Can anyone offer any suggestions that I've missed?  Or links to home-brew solutions.

Thanks
Fozzy