Nas

Electron3412 · June 22, 2020

I want to set up a nas running of my computer only using one hard drive on windows how would i do that.

Hairless Monkey · June 22, 2020

You can share a folder or a drive on your network.

BryanNichols10 · June 22, 2020

1 hour ago, Electron3412 said:

I want to set up a nas running of my computer only using one hard drive on windows how would i do that.

Hey man,

I would suggest checking out the NAS forum here on LTT, lots of people there who would be able to give you great advice on how to get up and running but i can give you some basics here.

So my first question is, why? what is it that you would like to be doing with a NAS? are you looking for basic file storage? Media server? If you could provide that info i could give you some more advice!

Secondly, you can set up file sharing on windows, but if you want to truly set up a NAS that will be flexible and much more useful, you would need to have a NAS specific OS installed and a machine that is dedicated to such a purpose. This may sound scary, but NAS's, especially for file storage, don't require massive amounts of computing power. So for example, mine i have set up is an AMD A10-6700 from nearly 10 years ago with 8gigs of DDR3 with its built in IGPU. So really if you have an old system lying around or can find one for cheap, that would give you a much better experience than running through windows.

Third, I mentioned a NAS specific OS. The one I like and find is really user and newbie friendly is FreeNas. It is an open source, free to use OS that with some video watching and guide reading, can be set up fairly easily. It also has support for plugins and VMs that you can use for other purposes besides file storage built into the OS.

Fourthly, if you decide to go the path of a NAS specific OS, you will need to have a separate drive besides the one you are trying to install your OS on. This could just be a usb, but the best recommendation would be a 120 gig SSD, or a 250 gig HDD that can serve as your boot drive, and then use your HDD that you mentioned as your actual storage drive.

So! To sum it up, yes im sure you can find a way to share files on your network. But if you want to set something up that will allow you to really easily do whatever it is you need and have a lot more control over your data, a dedicated machine running freenas is your best choice.

Hope this helps!