Using a Windows machine as a NAS

[Spork829]

I've been looking into building a super cheap home server system to run a few different things off of. One of these is a NAS. I know you can map a network drive and share files over the network within Windows, but to what extent? I'm not familiar with how I would do this. Would you recommend this for simple file sharing? I won't even have more than 3 clients transferring photos at one time, pretty minimal stuff. Do I need an entirely separate OS like FreeNAS or will the functionality within Windows work ok? 

[SuperShermanTanker]

2 minutes ago, Spork829 said:

I've been looking into building a super cheap home server system to run a few different things off of. One of these is a NAS. I know you can map a network drive and share files over the network within Windows, but to what extent? I'm not familiar with how I would do this. Would you recommend this for simple file sharing? I won't even have more than 3 clients transferring photos at one time, pretty minimal stuff. Do I need an entirely separate OS like FreeNAS or will the functionality within Windows work ok? 

You can use Windows for a NAS I have a machine running with Windows Server 2016 set up to just simply share the drive over the network and you can do the same in Windows 10

[Spork829]

1 minute ago, SuperShermanTanker said:

You can use Windows for a NAS I have a machine running with Windows Server 2016 set up to just simply share the drive over the network and you can do the same in Windows 10

Okay cool. Do you know if it's possible to only share specific folders, and also possibly to put a password on it so not everyone on the network can get in?

[flibberdipper]

You can use Windows fine for a NAS. I used to use Server 2012 R2 with multiple user accounts set up so that each share was totally private unless you had access to the physical machine. And I'd imagine you can do the same thing in consumer Windows as well.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If it's all Windows machines connecting to it, you can set up a Homegroup. Otherwise it would be easiest to set up one folder that's shared and do all your things from there.

 

It depends on your needs, but if all you need to do is just share files, that should be enough.

[Spork829]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If it's all Windows machines connecting to it, you can set up a Homegroup. Otherwise it would be easiest to set up one folder that's shared and do all your things from there.

 

It depends on your needs, but if all you need to do is just share files, that should be enough.

It won't necessarily be all Windows machines. How would I go about only sharing the one folder? That's pretty much exactly what I want.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, Spork829 said:

It won't necessarily be all Windows machines. How would I go about only sharing the one folder? That's pretty much exactly what I want.

http://www.howtogeek.com/school/windows-network-sharing/lesson7/all/

 

The way I see it, pick a folder and then populate it like a typical user's home folder. I believe when set up correctly, it'll show up in the network under /[PC NAME]/[FOLDER NAME]. It may or may not ask for a log in as well. However, I would highly recommend a standard user own the folder, that way you don't need to log in with an admin account to access it, if it needs a log in.

[Spork829]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

However, I would highly recommend a standard user own the folder, that way you don't need to log in with an admin account to access it, if it needs a log in.

Why is this? By standard user do you mean one without admin privileges on the NAS machine at all? Also thank you for the article. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Spork829 said:

Why is this? By standard user do you mean one without admin privileges on the NAS machine at all?

Yes. On my NAS box (It's not a Windows one, but similar principle applies) when I want to access a folder, I have to log in with an account. I don't want to use my admin account because well, if I need to share the log in information with someone else, welp, I just gave away the keys to the castle. With a standard user account, they can only access a minimal amount of stuff in the computer should they decide to log in directly rather than trying to access a network drive.

 

It's just a good practice.

[SuperShermanTanker]

13 minutes ago, Spork829 said:

Okay cool. Do you know if it's possible to only share specific folders, and also possibly to put a password on it so not everyone on the network can get in?

You can set it to share a specific folder I know one way of doing it via a peer to peer networking method and I know you can do it over a network because I have seen businesses, collages, and schools do it a lot but I don't know how off the top of my head

[Spork829]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Yes. On my NAS box (It's not a Windows one, but similar principle applies) when I want to access a folder, I have to log in with an account. I don't want to use my admin account because well, if I need to share the log in information with someone else, welp, I just gave away the keys to the castle. With a standard user account, they can only access a minimal amount of stuff in the computer should they decide to log in directly rather than trying to access a network drive.

 

It's just a good practice.

Ah I see. So basically I set up another user on the NAS PC with no admin privileges and put the folder somewhere only they could access (desktop or something) then it will ask for that login instead of the main admin account's? 

[manikyath]

17 minutes ago, Spork829 said:

Okay cool. Do you know if it's possible to only share specific folders, and also possibly to put a password on it so not everyone on the network can get in?

thats where windows home groups serve good

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Spork829 said:

Ah I see. So basically I set up another user on the NAS PC with no admin privileges and put the folder somewhere only they could access (desktop or something) then it will ask for that login instead of the main admin account's? 

Yeah. That's the idea

[Spork829]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

thats where windows home groups serve good

If only all of the clients were on Windows

[manikyath]

Just now, Spork829 said:

If only all of the clients were on Windows

what OSes are we talking? (and by the way, yes you can do something with passwords, but it tends to be flaky at best, not that using any other OS will save your cahones there)

[Doramius]

As stated previously, just create user accounts and set permissions in the security section of the folder.  

[Mira Yurizaki]

Oh, I should probably give you what I think is an ideal setup for this as far as accounts go

• You have your admin account. This account exists purely to do system maintenance (like kick off updates) and settings. Unless you really need to, this account should have no files. I would say deny access to the folders you want to share, but if you have admin access, you can just remove that anyway.
• Have an account that has read/write privileges on the folder you want to share. This is the account you use when you want to update the contents of the folder.
• Have another account that has read-only privileges on the folder you want to share. This is the guest account that you tell other people to use when they want to access content on your NAS.
  • If you want the guest account to have write privileges, make another folder and give them write privileges to that. Just make sure to give yourself at least read privileges.

Edited January 23, 2017 by M.Yurizaki

[Doramius]

For a class I taught, I had a dropbox.  nobody could open or edit any of the files, but they could upload to the folder as they had write access only.  They could turn in their homework, but I told them they had to make sure it was absolutely correct, because once submitted, they couldn't change it.

[Spork829]

7 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Oh, I should probably give you what I think is an ideal setup for this as far as accounts go

• You have your admin account. This account exists purely to do system maintenance (like kick off updates) and settings. Unless you really need to, this account should have no files. I would say deny access to the folders you want to share, but if you have admin access, you can just remove that anyway.
• Have an account that has read/write privileges on the folder you want to share. This is the account you use when you want to update the contents of the folder.
• Have another account that has read-only privileges on the folder you want to share. This is the guest account that you tell other people to use when they want to access content on your NAS.
  • If you want the guest account to have write privileges, make another folder and give them write privileges to that. Just make sure to give yourself at least read privileges.

I had another question if you don't mind: Do you think I should go with a WD Red because it'll be operating pretty close to 24/7, or a Blue because the OS is going to be on and the Red would be too slow for that?

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Spork829 said:

I had another question if you don't mind: Do you think I should go with a WD Red because it'll be operating pretty close to 24/7, or a Blue because the OS is going to be on and the Red would be too slow for that?

I'd go with Reds. And if possible a separate drive altogether for the OS.

[kirashi]

8 hours ago, manikyath said:

thats where windows home groups serve good

8 hours ago, Spork829 said:

If only all of the clients were on Windows

This. Exactly this. There's no point in even using SMB or SAMBA (unless you're using a version that actually works well) since most implementations are slow as hell between different operating systems and devices. OP's best option here might be learning to roll his own OwnCloud based setup if OP doesn't want to get into UnRAID or a custom Debian server, for example. At least with OwnCloud OP would get a pretty GUI and be able to manage things easier.

[manikyath]

5 hours ago, kirashi said:

This. Exactly this. There's no point in even using SMB or SAMBA (unless you're using a version that actually works well) since most implementations are slow as hell between different operating systems and devices. OP's best option here might be learning to roll his own OwnCloud based setup if OP doesn't want to get into UnRAID or a custom Debian server, for example. At least with OwnCloud OP would get a pretty GUI and be able to manage things easier.

with those two how are you intending to thet data to the clients? exactly: SMB

 

and owncloud... is a disaster of a resource hog, and not practical at all for local network storage.

[Spork829]

9 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I'd go with Reds. And if possible a separate drive altogether for the OS.

I've got a pretty slim budget, maybe I'll try to find a cheap 80GB SSD or something for the boot drive.

[Mira Yurizaki]

28 minutes ago, Spork829 said:

I've got a pretty slim budget, maybe I'll try to find a cheap 80GB SSD or something for the boot drive.

Yeah, that'll work. 64GB would do too once you've stripped out the unnecessary things and turn off hibernate. My current Windows build sits at ~30GB of storage use, even with the apps I have installed

[Spork829]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Yeah, that'll work. 64GB would do too once you've stripped out the unnecessary things and turn off hibernate.

I didn't know why you said that, but then I checked WinDirStat on my laptop and WOW the hiberfile.sys takes up quite a bit of space.