Noob questions about NAS

rgMekanic

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Hey [H], I want to move my large collection of completely legal backups and the like off my main rig and into something else.

Right now all my completely legal backups are stored here, then setup for sharing through windows so I can access them from the HTPC in the living room.

Would a NAS Be the best option? Or would taking an old PC, loading windows on it and filling it with HDD's then setting up sharing in windows like I'm currently doing be the easier/faster option?

I honestly only need 3-4TB as of right now, but as my completely legal collection of backups grows, I'd like to be able to expand capacity with little headaches.

Thanks!
 
No one wants to help a storage newb :unsure:

two hours? really? people do have lives outside the internet you know ;)

You OS are you comfortable with?
What is your budget if you were to go with a NAS?

currently 3TB hard drives are just above 100 bucks. You could also go with a pre built system as well. I'll let other cime in who are more familiar with the latest and greatest
 
I built a mini-itx server build with FreeNAS from the ground up with 0% knowledge of how to do it. It would probably be more expensive than what you're looking for, but it was a great long-term commitment for me since it helped me learn coding.

If you want simple, why don't you connect a HDD to an HTPC? Research NAS options in the process and when you're ready to go past 4TB than you can make another decision.
 
two hours? really? people do have lives outside the internet you know ;)

You OS are you comfortable with?
What is your budget if you were to go with a NAS?

currently 3TB hard drives are just above 100 bucks. You could also go with a pre built system as well. I'll let other cime in who are more familiar with the latest and greatest

10 hours ;)

Mostly windows, though not afraid to play with others. I've looked into the pre-built systems, quite out of my budget at the moment for something from Qnap or Synology that would give me the ablity to expand in the future.


I built a mini-itx server build with FreeNAS from the ground up with 0% knowledge of how to do it. It would probably be more expensive than what you're looking for, but it was a great long-term commitment for me since it helped me learn coding.

If you want simple, why don't you connect a HDD to an HTPC? Research NAS options in the process and when you're ready to go past 4TB than you can make another decision.

I could do that, but the issue is say I'm using a file sharing program to download the latest hot linux distro, I'd like to be able to download directly to the attached storage, and popular file sharing program is on my main rig.

What I'd love, and I have no idea if it's possible, it to have a setup that just showed up as a drive letter on all the PCs in the house.
 
Just build a cheap server. That is what I use. Holds backups..does torrenting ...hosts my printer and I can spin up VM's in it real ez. I use 2008 r2 windows server.
 
Cheap box and softraid or fork over the cash and get a 2 bay NAS and run in Raid 1 for now. I have a Lenovo 2 bay NAS I use for critical files and it allows me to SSH in, download remotely, set up rsync backups to an external, etc.

You can easily map a NAS to a drive letter. Most are SAMBA/Windows Networking compatible.

Shows up as \\DEVICENAME
 
Just build a cheap server. That is what I use. Holds backups..does torrenting ...hosts my printer and I can spin up VM's in it real ez. I use 2008 r2 windows server.

Now when it comes to torrenting, can you say, use your gaming rig with the torrent program on it, but have the server setup as the file destination?
 
What I'd love, and I have no idea if it's possible, it to have a setup that just showed up as a drive letter on all the PCs in the house.
This is exactly what a NAS is. You could do that with a shared drive on your PC or HTPC, but the device would have to remain on. Low power draw is another benefit of NAS devices. It sounds like that's what you want.
 
Now when it comes to torrenting, can you say, use your gaming rig with the torrent program on it, but have the server setup as the file destination?
I guess you could have the torrents saved to a network drive. But why? Let the server run the torrent program so you can use your gaming rig for, um, GAMING!!!.
 
Now when it comes to torrenting, can you say, use your gaming rig with the torrent program on it, but have the server setup as the file destination?

Most NASes have a control panel that allows you to set up torrenting directly on the device itself.

torrent.png.png
 
Thanks for all the help so far, I'm sure I'm gonna have more in this thread, I ended up picking up a 2x2TB Seagate NAS from ebay for cheap, should be here Sat. for me to start messing around with it.
 
I could do that, but the issue is say I'm using a file sharing program to download the latest hot linux distro, I'd like to be able to download directly to the attached storage, and popular file sharing program is on my main rig.

What I'd love, and I have no idea if it's possible, it to have a setup that just showed up as a drive letter on all the PCs in the house.

This is exactly what NAS can do for you. For instance, I have my NAS with several popular file sharing programs, also with Plex, and some media organization suites too. You want a NAS.
 
I'm quite partial to and extremely happy with FreeNAS + jails/plugins. However my storage server is exactly that, it does storage for everything on the network (iSCSI, NFS exports and mounts, CIFS, AFP for TimeMachine). Plex, Transmission and MineOS are my favs plugins and then there are a couple BSD jails for testing and services that don't come as PBIs (Apache, lighttp, mediawiki, etc). Because of its assigned duties I used server grade parts so the price tag was a bit higher. The most important of which was, once I decided I was going all in on ZFS, ECC memory. If I lose my wife's pictures and videos again (to be fair I didn't actually lose them lose them the first time) then I'd expect to be on the couch permanently. ZFS, ECC, snapshots, RAIDZ3, off site cloud backup and identical system build at my dad's (which I zfs send to) is my storage arrangement of choice.
 
You don't need specific file sharing software to setup a NAS. However, some versions of Winblows do make it easier. WinXP is probably the easiest to set up a NAS system, later Windows version have more settings to adjust or permissions that need checked. With an old WinXP system you pretty much share the drive or desired folders, then on the client machines you can map network drives or use hotlinks.

You would be wise to set a static LAN ip to your NAS system.

You also don't need a ton of processor in a NAS system. Faster buses(PCI/PCIe, SATA, etc) and NIC cards/network will help more than CPU power. You'll only need additional CPU power if you are using software to share stuff.
 
Well my Seagate D2 arrived today, got it hooked up, firmware updates and the like, running it in the default raid mode with 2 TB drives, if I need more storage I can always combine the volumes or upgrade drives later. Working pretty well so far, drives only have 1000 hours on them. Not too shabby for $80 on eBay heh.

Quick question..

Is this configuration correct? Newbie questions remember heh, just didn't know if it was supposed to show up looking like a physical drive or not
 

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Just a little check in bump, making sure stuff is correct. It's all running awesome so far, got 300GB of stuff off my gaming PC
 
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