Help building a home NAS Drive

[BH2062]

Please help! - How do you build a home NAS drive that you can access through any device at home with an old PC

 

Basically i want to make a NAS drive out of an old PC, I want to be able to access it from any device and it to be easy to use once set up.

 

I have been given an old PC and want to turn it into a NAS drive as is isn't really powerful enough to use for anything else.

 

What's the best way to do this and what do I need to do this as this is my first attempt at making a NAS drive. Any relevant links would be great or written tutorial.

 

Thanks

[DnFx91]

fill it with HDD's and set up a windows share. right click the drive or folder, go to properties, set up sharing, set permissions, then you will be able to see that share in the network tab of explorer on any windows machine on the same network.

[BH2062]

Would that work with apple devices like Mac and Iphone as some of my family use Apple. And is it easy to access.

I need like an all purpose user friendly NAS Drive as my family wont know how to connect with it

[DnFx91]

3 minutes ago, BH2062 said:

Would that work with apple devices like Mac and Iphone as some of my family use Apple. And is it easy to access.

I need like an all purpose user friendly NAS Drive as my family wont know how to connect with it

yeah OSX handles windows samba shares pretty well now, i think network shares just show up in finder on the left same as in explorer in windows, just need to connect and login. don't think you can permanently map a windows share in OSX though, i stand to be corrected though. But you can map the share in windows so that it's always connected and always in your explorer.

[DnFx91]

5 minutes ago, BH2062 said:

Would that work with apple devices like Mac and Iphone as some of my family use Apple. And is it easy to access.

I need like an all purpose user friendly NAS Drive as my family wont know how to connect with it

as for iphone, probably not, unless theres a samba/SMB app for that, i'm way out of the loop with iphones

[BH2062]

Could this be used as like a cloud storage like Dropbox so I can almost drag and drop from a folder as if a USB was plugged in?

[Sprawlie]

15 minutes ago, BH2062 said:

Could this be used as like a cloud storage like Dropbox so I can almost drag and drop from a folder as if a USB was plugged in?

 

Yup. if you create a network share, you can add that network share to your local computers as mounted drives.

 

In windows, they will be assigned a drive letter when they are mounted so that you can use them "LIKE" they are a real drive on your computer (albeit, a slow drive since it's attached via network, so I wouldn't recommend running programs from it)

 

once you have the drive shared from the server, go to your windows workstation and open a windows explorer window. Type in the address bar "\\<servername>\" (obviously replace <servername> with the actual hostname of the server, or IP address). when you see the list of shares you've made, you can right click on them and select "map network drive"

 

OSx is a little more difficult to operate in this manner. And neither Android nor iOS can do this. However, if you're willing to learn linux for the server, there are opensource software packages out there that will let you create a "cloud" similar to dropbox that other devices can use via Apps

 

[BH2062]

that would be better as I am trying to cater for people who don't know a great deal about how to use a PC

[Sprawlie]

I've never set it up myself, but there are options like owncloud. freenas might have a setup to support it. I'd recommend googling it. probably find a few good guides just by searching "linux cloud server"

[BH2062]

ok I will give free nas a go and see if its any good

[paddy-stone]

2 hours ago, BH2062 said:

ok I will give free nas a go and see if its any good

Yes, freeNAS is very good.. takes a little bit to get used to it, but worth the effort of finding out how to do stuff. There are tons of guides online about how to go about it, but besically all you need to do is set up the basic stuff like root access during installation, and set a static address for your NIC(s) if you want to. Then you can do the rest of the setup thorugh a webadmin.