[branlr]

I was hoping someone could clear some things up for me. Basically, I have an asrock ion in a bedroom, a self-built desktop with an i7 920 running as my main htpc, and an old dell dell 8300 with 3ghz pentium 4 in an other bedroom.

All running win7 ultimate.

So the question is, how is best to share the files on my 1.5 and 2 tb internal hard drives?

Right now, they live in my i7 machine in the living room and are simply shared through windows. This is fine, but it can be annoying sometimes (having to occassionally log in, etc.) I also run SABNZBD and utorrent (w/ webUI) on this computer, and share the blackhole files for both to enable downloading from other locations.

ideally, I would be running everything like this off the Dell, because it is out of the way, gets less usage, and I prefer not to leave every computer on all the time.

However, it only has 2 SATA inputs on the mobo, and I don't want to install an operating system on either of my 2 storage drives, and I would prefer to avoid the mess of many external hard drives, as well as the slowness of accessing 1080p content over usb, and then over a wireless N 5ghz network. Basically, I found myself without content in my living room (the i7 machine) one too many times because of flakey network issues, and decided it would be best to have the files live out there for the time.

Considering all of this, what are the benefits to running something like freenas, or windows home server, as opposed to sharing through windows 7? I don't want to completely monopolize any computer as just a server, so, would it be reasonable to load these in a virtual machine?

Are there any good options for putting more hard drives in the Dell, such as a PCI card or something?

My goals are to have a reliable network storage system that is easily expandable in the future, and ideally, would show as a unified drive rather than multiple drives--without a new machine, and without sacrificing the functionality of an old machine entirely.


Any input is appreciated!

Thanks!

[vikjon0]

However, it only has 2 SATA inputs on the mobo, and I don't want to install an operating system on either of my 2 storage drives

If you switch to linux (e.g. xbmclive) you can run the OS from an USB flash.

Are there any good options for putting more hard drives in the Dell, such as a PCI card or something?

Last time I looked into that was before SATA but unless things have chnaged you can just pick up a SATA controller card and plugin. RAID if you want to.

would it be reasonable to load these in a virtual machine?

I dont fully understand what this would accomplish? You want to host a virtual NAS on your desktop? I pretty sure you can, but I am not sure if you can get RAID etc to work. Typically you run RAID on the host not in the guest OS. The question is why you would want to? is the only reason that you dont want login into the deskop? Why is that a problem, it is probably easier than using a NAS. Just use RDP. If need to access remotly while someone else is using it patch the terminal server to allow muliple sessions. (google)