All about Nas

I recently got a NAS up and running. And it’s pretty fantastic??? It’s kinda changed how I use my computer (in a good way).

This kind of stuff has been around for a very long time, but it’s new to me! I’m enjoying it greatly.

What is NAS

I think different people have different uses for it. Our use case is:
it’s a big shared hard drive.

(In this case, “shared” meaning: shared within your local household.)

So, instead of storing certain files locally on your desktop/laptop hard drive, you instead store it on the NAS. This is great for things like:

• videos
• pictures
• music
• anything you want

Basically: stuff you want to share with other people in the household and/or stuff you want to migrate with you between your computer upgrades.

(If you’re more ambitious, there’s a lot more uses for a NAS. But I’m extremely ok with just treating it as a simple “big hard drive that just stores stuff”)

What does it look like

I used an old computer we had that was lying around gathering dust. It’s connected to our wifi router. That’s it.

(There’s also purpose-built NAS machines such as Synology, TerraMaster, etc. I decided to use an old computer largely because we just happened to have an old computer lying around)

How do you access it

At least in Windows, it’s basically treated like a separate hard drive.

In file explorer I enter the NAS’s address, something like \\192.168.123.123 and it shows me the NAS’s files. I can then drag files into or out of the NAS machine.

File transfer is pretty fast, about 100 megabytes per second. You can get setups where you can transfer 1 gigabyte per second, but my specific hardware didn’t allow for that.

What software does it use

I used TrueNAS. Free!

It was a surprisingly straightforward process to install it and set it up. There’s a handful of YouTube videos that do a clear walkthrough of the process.

I used a combination of these 2 videos:

• HOW TO INSTALL TrueNAS SCALE FOR BEGINNERS
• How I Configure TrueNAS (Complete Setup Guide)

What’s the deal

Things I like:

• Your files are kept in a hard drive in your room, instead of floating in a cloud somewhere. This has pluses and minuses, but I like the simplicity.
• It’s a setup we own.
• It makes long-term file storage separate from your desktop/laptop computer.
• It simplifies decision-making about files. Picture, video, or music? Just throw it on the NAS.

Et al

Big thanks to Dante for introducing me to the the world of NAS stuff.

Over the years I’ve definitely lost a lot of old files and old projects. Perhaps for the best??? It doesn’t really bother me – I’m glad I made them, they’re gone from the world but not gone from my heart, etc etc – but it is nice to now have an easy, straightforward, simple way to archive things.