Look no further than FreeNas

So, my desktop PC at home died recently. The motherboard blew up leaving me with 4 drives that I couldn’t access data from without pluggin in my trusty IDE/SATA to USB converter. Now this can be a pain when your tunes are spread across multiple drives or I am accessing my PC remotely and happen to need data from the drive that isn’t plugged into the adapter.

With funds being tight, I decided to look to my old friend FreeNas to take care of my data sharing needs. FreeNas is a NAS operating system made strictly for creating a network storage device. It can be run on older hardware, so I dug around and found a old 800mhz PC with 512mb of ram and the gigabit NIC from my recently dead PC. With the addition of a SATA to IDE converter (I had a SATA drive) and an IDE expansion card, I popped in the FreeNas CD and started installing. I decided to install the OS on an old 3 gig hard drive I had lying around. Installation is as easy as answering a few questions and your up and running. Once installed I was able to log into the remote console (via the web interface) and mount each of my NTFS formatted drives with ease. Another added bonus is FreeNas, among its many features, has a built in FTP server. Now all my data is available remotely through FTP. Thanks FreeNas for solving my Data Whoes!

(FreeNas can be found at http://www.freenas.org)