

This software allows for many different configurations. NASFree is great if you have older hardware lying around the house. NAS4Free is similar to FreeNAS but allows you to install NAS software on an older 32 bit system. They have a good forum if you get stuck with your install or have questions. More how-to videos from the FreeNAS site. Here is a video description of the install process from the FreeNAS team:įreeNAS has a whole series of how-to videos to install and best configure the software. At least 1 direct-attached disk (Hardware RAID strongly discouraged).8GB Boot Drive (USB Flash Drive suffices).Multicore 64-bit* processor (Intel strongly recommended).iSCSI also supports VMware VAAI, Microsoft ODX, and Microsoft Windows Server 20 R2 Clustering. Every major operating system is supported with SMB/CIFS (Windows file shares), NFS (Unix file shares), and AFP (Apple File Shares) as well as FTP, iSCSI (block sharing), WebDAV, and other methods of sharing data over the network are available. The nice part about FreeNAS is you can control and configure your NAS box from a computer browser. Types of NAS Software FreeNASįreeNAS – is a great free software package that can be installed on just about any platform that allows you to share your data over your computer network. Let’s look at some options for free software to turn your computer into a stand-alone home NAS server. We will show you how to do both in this article. The other option is to build one using new parts for a low power consumption system. There are several ways you can configure your NAS setup, depending on your needs and the number of drives you plan on using.

Basically, you will need a computer case, motherboard, hard drives, network card, and a USB key or SD card.

I had a lot of older computer parts lying around and was able to piece one together. I have been using this server for many years to serve up videos and backup important data.
