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Julian Hall wrote: > Hi All, > > A friend of mine has been looking into setting up a NAS drive for backup > and network share of his files. The ideal system would have two 500Gb > drives in a RAID 1 configuration It seems that the prebuilt NAS > enclosures all use Linux and state the available formats are FAT32, EXT2 > and EXT3. He does a lot of video work in raw AVI format, over the 4Gb > limit for FAT32 (he's a Windows user) so he wouldn't be able to format > it as FAT32. > > 1. Would there be any problem with using an EXT3 (or 2) formatted drive > on a NAS drive accessed by a Windows PC? I'm thinking there wouldn't be > as the enclosure's Linux firmware would handle all the data throughput > and the enduser PC would just see a drive to read and write to, or is > that complete cobblers? > > I would assume that as long as the NAS supports the filesystem on the drive then it would probably work and just offer up file shares via Samba or something along those lines. > 2. If (1) wouldn't work, is there any major issue with an NTFS drive > being used in a NAS enclosure? > > That I'm not sure about. I'd assume unless the device specifically supported NTFS, if you stuck an NTFS formatted drive in there it would probably need to be reformatted in a supported filesystem. > 3. He's also considering building a NAS server out of old bits and > installing FreeNAS. Any experience of this, pitfalls, idiosyncrasies? > Well I'd say if he has the bits lying around when it's at least worth giving it a try before stumping up the cash. Looking at the FreeNAS manual. it appears the minimum specs are a PC with 96MB Ram, one or more hard drives and a network interface (onboard or an addon card). It has i386, i686 and AMD64 images on the web site so I would assume it would pretty much easily cover a Pentium/K6 or higher CPU. It lists a couple of compatible network cards, but I'd have thought it would support the popular cards (Realtek, 3Com, Intel, Broadcom, NVidia etc). The manual can be found here: http://www.freenas.org/downloads/docs/user-docs/FreeNAS-SUG.pdf Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html