I'm looking for a OS for my Server / NAS on my network. I would like easy to use and kinda basic. I have lots of experience in Windows and just the basics of Ubuntu.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry I'm not sure if this question is in the appropriate section.
I alrady have hard drives with pictures, music and video. Would it be posable, Put them into the NAS after step up was compleat? I found no mention on FreeNAS to do so.
I have 1 x 20gb for os and 1 x 1.5tb but I have 1tb of data on the drive.
If the 1.5 TB drive is the only drive you have to add for storage, that could be a bit of a problem. I believe you can still import the volume, but if it is NTFS formatted I don't think you can get write support. You should be able to serve the whole disk up via iSCSI to get read-write, but that may not be ideal.
I earnestly suggest obtaining a matching 1.5 TB drive to create a ZFS volume in FreeNAS, copy the files from your NTFS drive to the ZFS filesystem, then wipe the NTFS drive and add it to the ZFS pool as a mirror of the other drive. This will serve to ensure the integrity of your data. I've suffered in the past from poor judgement and set up my drives for striping instead of mirroring, and let me tell you, it is no fun when one of the drives fails and suddenly the data on both drives is lost. Of course using a single storage drive is also risky.
The iSCSI option could work if you only plan on mounting the storage drive from one client machine at a time (or risk of data corruption). Windows has an integrated iSCSI initiator (client). iSCSI basically presents the whole disk to the client over the network as if it were locally attached. It operates as a block device, so any filesystem supported by the client OS can be used. The caveat is, I doubt you could have the drive mounted to FreeNAS and a client machine at the same time. My intuition tells me that NTFS would not like being mounted multiple times simultaneously. But you could try...
No it can't, but access is guaranteed through cifs/smb.
Problem with windows clients is that they can't rsync or cron of course, and windows files have a lot of dead space. Running Windows in a kvm container in linux with a overlay for the windows storage solves that, in most cases it reduces the windows storage waste by 2/3 or more by compressing the dead space from windows files, and it's possible to both rsync and cron sync jobs.