NAS Questions
 

I have multiple hard drives that I have recently placed inside a new PC case, currently holding 11, and 1 IDE DVD drive. Anyone familiar with NAS, can they post a link to the various ones out there. I know of unraid, and freenas, but would like to try the others to see which is the best for my needs.

Would I need to add new empty drives to a setup or can the OS detect an existing hard disks contents? I don't want to spend days copying old data to new drives just so that it'll work.

Can I share all drives to a network with having to give all the drives a unique name? Sharing files under WinXP and Win 7 is ridiculously tedious when you have as many drives as I do.

Any recommendations for SATA controller cards? 4 ports ideally?. The only one I'm seeing that is fairly reasonable is from startech.

Most of the ports on the router are occupied by ethernet wires to other computers. If I wanted to setup a NAS but there aren't anymore free ports, would I need to look into a router with more ports or is there a way to expand it?

Thanks for any replies you can offer.

Re: NAS Questions
 

1) You can "expand" your lan by connecting a switch to the router and then connecting devices to the switch. You would be wise to put your pcs/laptops/nas on the switch and anything else on the router so if you are doing bulky file transfers or streaming stuff, the traffic doesn't hit the router unless it is going out to another device (e.g printer) or the internet

2) I am a bit confused but if you have put hdds inside a pc case why dont you raid 5 them and map the drives across the network. You might think it is a ball ache to setup to start off with but once it is done that is it.

Re: NAS Questions
 

1) Besides the NAS I want to setup and other PCs and laptops there aren't any other devices I want to hook up to the router, but I'll have a mess around with it if things seems less than optimal once I get round to it.
2) I want to avoid using RAID. It just seems like it's going to be more of a complication and additional costs to implement.

Thanks for the response. :) Sorry for the late reply, thread didn't seem like it was going to get any.

Re: NAS Questions
 

A NAS is going to be far more cost than inbuilt RAID...