Windows as a NAS question

[Mcthommo]

I’m being asked by a relative if this is possible:
Home office with 1xpc, 1x Mac mini constant use daily.
Could a separate small Windows based pc be used as an effective NAS for both
Only needing to share files and media files between the work pc and Mac mini.
Not needing to back up any files- could expand the HDD in the pc NAS to a single large unit? Or more likely would keep 4 separate drives dedicated to one thing- music, TV shows, Movies and “work” files.
I have looked at Unraid and that but this way means that I wouldn’t have to setup or format anything- just add the drives and move the files across

 

[LostCorpse]

short anwser is yes you can do that with simple file shares. its if you want raid or simple single disk volums.
depends on your build budget and things like that.

something like :

HP ProLiant Microserver G10​

repalcing the optical disk with an ssd might work for you.

Do the ssd mod first then install your chosen OS
then add the disks.
should be that simple on the hardware side.
you may need to sort out permissions and shares after but not to long of difficult.

if your setting up raid then you need to copy files over. if using single volume disks you wont.

you just have some thoughts on the OS / raid and costs really.


just remember anything you share anyone else could potentially access if you have bad password managment.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Yes, windows alone would work ... but with the likes of unraid its designed from the outset to work as a sharing machine and be flexible in how it does it. Everything you need to setup shares and control access is immediately available to you instead of deep diving menus.

could expand the HDD in the pc NAS to a single large unit? Or more likely would keep 4 separate drives dedicated to one thing- music, TV shows, Movies and “work” files.

You absolutely could do that ... then I presume you would have each drive as a share which would individually map as a network drive viewed from the office and mac computers ?

but with something like unraid, you could combine those same 4 drives into an array and create a single large amount of space. Then within that large volume of space you create 4 shares ... each of which your office and mac would map to in the same way. Then in theory, if your movies content were to grow in size beyond the original "movies" hdd size was, unraid would just expand the "movies" share across the other disks in the array. Equally, lets say your "work" data was only a few hundred GB in size, if held on a seperate disk, you would have a lot of wasted space on even a 2TB hdd. Unraid would be able to use that space for the other shares. Its this sort of flexibility to systems like unraid which normal windows becomes clunky against.

Not needing to back up any files

But can you afford to outright lose them ? I understand that the only copy of the files might reside on the NAS and not backed up ... but if in your separate drives setup the "work" drive was to fail, you would lose all of that drive's data. gone. Whereas if that drive were within an unraid array ( or truenas etc etc ), then if the same drive failed, the data would still be recoverable via the parity checking. Simple case of swapping in a replacement drive and letting the system rebuild over a few hours.


All that said ... why do you need a wholly seperate unit ? If you're really not bothered about the backup aspect, why not whack a single large HDD into the PC, create 4 folders inside the drive and share the drive to the mac mini. The mac mini opens the drive, and sees the same 4 folders ... although 1 share. That way the windows PC would see it directly, and the mac mini also. No middle man chewing up additional leccy.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Yeh it's possible to do what you want to do in most scenarios.. bare in mind are you prepared to lose the hardware cost in failures?

...but let me remind you no matter what OS you may require a backup.
Unless the data can be lost that is and you make sure you won't cry if the data is gone.

Please make sure you put in a backup/restore scenario and don't overlook this.


** I'm adding this to the post to remind people about backups even know OP has specifically said they are not needing a backup.

 

[Mcthommo]

FWIW
I wouldn’t have a drive big enough to use a single drive so would need to use multiple ones- size ranges from 2ishTB for work files, 8TBish for Music files, much the same for Movies and maybe double for TV shows- fer too much I know
My office pc is also not really large enough to fit in 3.5 drives and have a node 804 sitting around doing nowt so will use that to house the drives/ can fit 8x 3.5 drives plus a couple of SSD and NVME that are lying free.
All these files are held fully backed up on a separate Synology NAS at my work office location so I can’t/won’t lose anything apart from the time aspect which is not a problem
I’m away on holidays currently and will ponder it a bit more