I have a large pile of drives of various sizes laying around and i want to convert an unused system into a sort of nas/server. Basically 5 people(10 devices) who aren't super tech savvy but understand finding windows shares and general windows stuff will need to manually dump large amounts of media files weekly to whatever share(a whole drive) until its full then i will take out the drive and put a new one in and setup a new share. i will be using a 4 bay hotswap setup to swap drives too so wont need to shutdown the system for long stretches. basically it needs to be on 24/7. Also in the event i am not on location to swap out drives and setup a new share i need to be able to tell someone how to do it by phone. so easy CIFS setup is required. Also the "server" will not really need to "serve" files back to clients just dump stuff from clients to the "server/nas". I have 4 options available i have been thinking about and have access to right now. Windows Server 2008r2 Windows Server 2012r2 regular old windows 7 or 8 Ubuntu(a couple of the dudes have used it a couple times) freenas(this might be annoying as i want single drives not pools) It might not seem like it with this sentence structure but i personally am comfortable with all of these options but im having trouble deciding about what the lowest common denominator is capable of using when im not around. and i want to limit command line stuff big time. when my group fills up the huge pile of drives in like 18 months or so im gonna transition to a more professional looking RAID5/6/10 array with some sweet 10 gig action and everything. any input would be cool. edit-if it matters the os will be installed on an ssd and the regular drives will be the ones with the actual dump data on them. so i can easily setup the big raid array later on without reconfiguring the os.
hmm. very nice. ill setup a small testing environment and see if the dudes have any issues with it. my server 2008/2012 testing environment isnt looking very good with these guys even though i made the server versions fancy looking like the desktop versions. i was almost just gonna stick windows 8 on the nas and call it a day but this looks like it could be easy enough for these simpletons i have to deal with a full windows os just for a nas just seems like a waste.
