Looking for simple NAS

[newnews]

Hello,

I have Asus O!play Air as my NAS(run SAMBA service), it works ok. Now I have spare PC and I want to setup as true NAS. I need am looking for very simple NAS solution:

1. I have one SATA 1.5 TB harddrive, one IDE 120GB at home. They are all NTFS systems, but use only 1.5TB drive as storage drive. I wish to install XP on 120GB hard drive. Because I may boot to XP occasionally as HTPC, so I need access the 1.5TB drive in XP too.
2. No need any RAID.

Looks like FreeNAS does not support NTFS and IDE hard drive, and must have 3 harddrives for RAID? If the 1.5TB drive must be NFS/ZFS system, how can I convert it to NFS/ZFS if FreeNAS doesn't support NTS? I already have many files and I do not want to copy to another place and then copy back after reformated.

Any advice? If FreeNAS cannot do that, is there any other system can do the work? Thanks

 

[survive]

Hi newnews,

The short answer is you can't.

If all you need is to share out the 1.5TB drive via CIFS why not just use XP and be done with it?

-Will

 

[newnews]

Thanks for your reply. I think NAS probably faster than shared folder in XP. However, FREENAS looks like need powerful hardware so I went for NAS4FREE. I installed NAS4FREE on my old destop, using only one HDD(NFS). It works great. I also instaled XP on another HDD. I can choose which one to boot via BIOS setting. Only thing is on XP I cannot access NFS.

 

[survive]

Hi newnews,

Just so you know both FreeNAS & NAS4Free are based on the same underlying OS and they should have roughly the same system requirements given the same usage. If you are re-purposing an old PC that's under the suggested spec (which really assumes you want to use ZFS for your filesystem) with UFS either one should work just fine.

-Will