Old PC as a NAS

[penguin8967]

I have an old PC with an i3-2120 and 8GB DDR3 RAM. I'm interested in using it as a NAS, but I have a few questions.

 

1) I'm an absolute noob at this kind of server stuff and have never made a NAS before. I've heard there's services like FreeNAS but idk how to use them. Any advice?

 

2) What devices can you access a NAS on?

[FloRolf]

1. Yes, Freenas is a free NAS OS and it has a very large userbase so there are tons of tutorials etc online. I use it myself. It does get tricky from time to time though. 

 

2. Pretty much everything. 

[Kon-Tiki]

OpenMediaVault (OMV) also is a free NAS solution coming as a ready to use OS. I've only experimented around with it a little bit but from my experience it is relatively easy to use. Your computer is very well capable of running it.

Accessing wise you should not have any problem what so ever as OMV supports the SMB protocol used on Windows computers and can also be used on Linux and MacOS machines. As far as mobiles are concerned it depends on your device and the server software, though I'm sure there is a way to do so if you wanted to.

[doommood]

FreeNAS is the easy way to build NAS. More advanced would be take Linux/Ubuntu Server distributive, set it up, install ZFS on Linux and set up NFS/SMB shares.

Such shares would be available for any device that has it support. In particular, any Windows, Linux, macOS can "speak" with NFS and SMB.