In Linux you can run lsusb on the command line to list all currently connected USB devices but you may find a number of the entires give a pretty generic or blank name for the device.

This is simply because those devices aren't listed in your copy of the USB ID database, this database can be easily updated with USBUtils update-usbids.

Awesome problem solved... So what's the problem? You will notice that if you run update-usbids and then run it again right away you will download the database twice.. but I already have an upto date copy of the database...

Using a Raspberry Pi seems to make alot of sense if you're in the market for a small NAS server, it's low cost, low profile, low energy etc...

Is It Up To It?

The only possible problem is the storage the only way to attach any real storage to a Pi is via USB. USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480Mbits/s with a but I dont think you'll ever get anywhere near that speed.

We only really need to acheieve around 10MB/s as then the ethernet connection becomes the bottleneck

Benchmarking

I wanted to see what kind of throughput I could actually get with USB devices connected to a Pi so I wrote a device benchamarker tool that is able to measure both the read and write speeds of one or more block devices.