How to set up a network including a external hard drive

[palcris]

hi there i was wondering if anybody would be able to help me, i am wanting to set up a network in the house so that the whole family can access the same files and free up our main pc. does anyone know if this is possible? one of the laptops is a mac will that cause any issues?
cheers

[jamiefrost]

One of the easiest ways will be to use a NAS drive (network attached storage). This is basically a hard disk with a network interface. They range in prices and most of them come with lots of other functionality.

You can give everyone they own personal spce and have 'public' areas pretty much any configuration you can think off. They can stream video and music to a PC act as an itunes server all sorts of stuff.

JJ

Originally Posted by palcris

hi there i was wondering if anybody would be able to help me, i am wanting to set up a network in the house so that the whole family can access the same files and free up our main pc. does anyone know if this is possible? one of the laptops is a mac will that cause any issues?
cheers

yes this is the way i have my home network set up

we have 2 laptops ,1 pc ,1 buffalo 500gb nas drive ,netgear router ,on the nas drive we keep backups of the pc's ,films that can be streamed and watched on the pc's or laptops and is very simple to set up
the only thing to be carefull of is the type of nas drive to buy .When you buy one make sure it can be formatted to ext3 file system or similar ,sometimes they will be pre-formatted to FAT32(you don't want that) and although they can be re-formatted they will not retain the networking capability

Ive been considering building one using a mini atx mobo with a Atom cpu as these are very low powered bung it in a small case with a couple of HDDs and run free NAS on it

[Dai]

Originally Posted by zing

Ive been considering building one using a mini atx mobo with a Atom cpu as these are very low powered bung it in a small case with a couple of HDDs and run free NAS on it

I did something similar about a year ago with an old freebie Dell box. That ran very quietly with Dell's ducted cooling system so was suitable for my needs. With freeNas it would run headless as well so it ended up living behind the piano and serving stuff to the rest of the network.

All it cost me was a couple of hard disks and worked very well.

the reason I like the idea of an atom based system is the 45 watt power consumption lol

[Dai]

Originally Posted by zing

the reason I like the idea of an atom based system is the 45 watt power consumption lol

Yep, makes a lot of sense. I'd probably do the same now this low power kit is available.