I'm converting a PC into a NAS / file server to handle storage of all media on my home network.
However, I'm having difficulty deciding on what OS to run. I need it to work with both Mac and Windows clients. FreeNAS seems like an obvious choice, but I'm concerned about filesystems. Right now I have 3 disks spanning 4TB all formatted in NTFS. It seems like FreeNAS prefers UFS, which poses a great challenge for me to back up all the existing data and reformat the drives. Is there a relatively painless work around to this problem?
Would using a more fully featured (but user friendly) distribution of linux, like Ubuntu, help me to get around the filesystem issue? I was initially attracted to FreeNAS because it can be run from a USB stick and easily administered via WebGUI.
Also, I'm not particularly familiar with RAIDs and not very interested in setting one up. Am I crazy for using a plain JBOD instead?
Finally, I'm curious about Time Machine backups of OSX onto the NAS. Does anyone have any experience with this? I think my wife would much rather do wireless backups of her MacBook Pro to the NAS rather than carry around a portable external hard drive.
Any input / advice would be great!
However, I'm having difficulty deciding on what OS to run. I need it to work with both Mac and Windows clients. FreeNAS seems like an obvious choice, but I'm concerned about filesystems. Right now I have 3 disks spanning 4TB all formatted in NTFS. It seems like FreeNAS prefers UFS, which poses a great challenge for me to back up all the existing data and reformat the drives. Is there a relatively painless work around to this problem?
Would using a more fully featured (but user friendly) distribution of linux, like Ubuntu, help me to get around the filesystem issue? I was initially attracted to FreeNAS because it can be run from a USB stick and easily administered via WebGUI.
Also, I'm not particularly familiar with RAIDs and not very interested in setting one up. Am I crazy for using a plain JBOD instead?
Finally, I'm curious about Time Machine backups of OSX onto the NAS. Does anyone have any experience with this? I think my wife would much rather do wireless backups of her MacBook Pro to the NAS rather than carry around a portable external hard drive.
Any input / advice would be great!