portable network attached storage device

It’s quite popular, and I ran it long ago with much success.īut, honestly, any computer already connected to your network could act as a basic NAS.

FreeNAS is a Linux-based distribution optimized specifically to act more like a dedicated NAS than a general-purpose operating system. If you or your machine aren’t up for installing another copy of Windows, and Linux isn’t your cup of tea, another alternative is to install FreeNAS on it. Take that old machine you have lying around, install the most recent version of Windows you can (for security purposes), attach the drives, and share them. You don’t have to run Linux (though of course you can), and you don’t have to get another device (though again, you can if you want to). Since it’s running Linux, I can do other things with the machine (which I do), but its primary job is to sit there and share those drives, acting as a basic NAS. As shown above, it’s not pretty, but it lives in my basement, so it doesn’t have to be. I installed Linux Mint on it, and using Samba file sharing, have three internal drives and five external drives shared by any computer on my network. In my case, my NAS is my old desktop machine of two generations (about 10 years) ago. More info on just what a NAS is or can be: What’s a NAS? How Do I Set One Up? Reuse, recycleĪ basic NAS actually turns out to be a great use for an older machine. Share those drives using the sharing facilities of the installed operating system, like Windows.Attach those external hard drives to a computer on your network.In fact, it’s essentially a two-step process: If you don’t need any of that - as I don’t - then just having storage on your local network is a piece of cake. Multiple ethernet connections for speed.Multiple file-sharing protocols, including those for Windows, Apple, and Linux, and potentially others, such as FTP or SFTP.RAID uses multiple disk drives to store data.

RAID for either speed or reliability or both.

Unfortunately, NAS has also come to imply dedicated devices that host storage optimized for file sharing. NAS - Network Attached Storage - is just that: disk storage on a device on your network that is made available for other devices on your network to access. But a basic NAS can consist of any machine sharing its connected disk drives - internal or external - to the LAN. The term can also imply dedicated devices, higher speed disks, RAID arrays, various networking protocols, and more. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and can be any storage attached and available across your local area network.

Portable network attached storage device