Adding an External Hard Drive with Samba to a Raspberry Pi

I started with an out-of-the-box 4TB Western Digital Blue drive. I put it into a Sabrent enclosure, powered it up and plugged it in. First step is to find the drive:

pi@raspberry:/mnt$ sudo lsblk -o UUID,NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL,MODEL
UUID                                 NAME        FSTYPE  SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL  MODEL

                                     sda                 3.7T                  WDC_WD40EZRZ-22GXCB0
                                     mmcblk0             3.7G                   
4AD7-B4D5                            ├─mmcblk0p1 vfat    256M /boot      boot   
2887d26c-6ae7-449d-9701-c5a4018755b0 └─mmcblk0p2 ext4    3.4G /          rootfs 

Now to format it:

pi@raspberry:/mnt $ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda

Create a directory:

pi@raspberry:/mnt $ sudo mkdir /mnt/ext_storage

Mount the drive in the directory:

pi@raspberry:/mnt $ sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt/ext_storage

Reboot:

pi@raspberry:/mnt $ sudo reboot

You'll get kicked out. Login again.  Verify that it's mounted:

pi@raspberry:/mnt/ext_storage $ sudo lsblk -o UUID,NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL,MODEL

UUID                                 NAME        FSTYPE  SIZE MOUNTPOINT       LABEL  MODEL

7dd94502-35a2-4bd3-a218-7cf76e350c7b sda         ext4    3.7T /mnt/ext_storage        WDC_WD40EZRZ-22GXCB0

                                     mmcblk0             3.7G                         

4AD7-B4D5                            ├─mmcblk0p1 vfat    256M /boot            boot   

2887d26c-6ae7-449d-9701-c5a4018755b0 └─mmcblk0p2 ext4    3.4G /                rootfs 

pi@raspberry:/mnt/ext_storage $ sudo blkid

/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="4AD7-B4D5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="80a50d6c-01"

/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="2887d26c-6ae7-449d-9701-c5a4018755b0" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="80a50d6c-02"

/dev/sda: UUID="7dd94502-35a2-4bd3-a218-7cf76e350c7b" TYPE="ext4"

/dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="80a50d6c" PTTYPE="dos"

Now set up Samba:

sudo chown pi /mnt/ext_storage

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

[ext_storage]

path = /mnt/ext_storage

writeable=Yes

create mask=0777

directory mask=0777

public=no

sudo smbpasswd -a pi

sudo systemctl restart smbd

After doing the above, I had a few issues. First, the external hard drive wasn't remounting when the Pi was rebooted. To fix this. I added the following to /etc/rc.local:

sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt/ext_storage

Next, some directories like the user home directory and the non-existent printer directories were showing up on some Samba clients like Macintosh and AppleTV VLC Player. The solution was to comment out the following sections in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[home]

[printers]

[print$]