Freenas or windows smb for xbmc

[risab1981]

Hi everyone. So I recently stumbled upon freenas. Set it up on a spare PC to test it out with a flash drive and a 64gb ssd. Copied a season of a TV show and added the share to xbmc to play on my nexus player. So far so good. Only problem I ran into was setting up a simple share with no login/password. The only info I found was to create a "guest" account and set permissions to allow read and write. This, for some reason , kept creating a "guest" sub folder and "homes" folders inside all the shared folders. I searched all over and couldn't find a solution. I couldn't delete them.
Is there a way to set up a simple smb share that won't require a log in on the client side that won't create subfoldders with the "guest" name?

Also this would be my first venture into raid. I have a case with a mb that holds and supports 6 drives. My only concern is, everything I keep reading about nas and nas hard drives leads me to believe the file system is meant to run 24/7. I do not need this in any way. I need storage to run a xbmc library, but I would like my drives to power down when they are not being used. I'm OK with waiting 5 seconds when accessing a video for the server to power it on . I really want to utilize raid z1 to have 3 drives or more and get a ton of storage with the spare for parity. I realize the server needs to be running but I don't need all -eventually- 6 drives constantly drawing power and being degraded.

Basically to sum up I need a large array of storage, but I do not need 24/7 constant up time. There are huge amounts of times during the week when we are at work during the day, where I would hate to have the 6 drives spinning, not being accessed.

My other option would be to do 6 drives on a windows software mirror at half the capacity and from what I read half the transfer speed.

Please help. Not sure which way to go here.
Right now I have a PC with a 4tb drive and a 1tb drive, 2 TB USB 1tb USB, all scattered...with individual volumes.

 

[dlavigne]

Is there a way to set up a simple smb share that won't require a log in on the client side that won't create subfoldders with the "guest" name?

This, as you discovered, is the default behaviour when creating a user account. After creating the user account, you can go back into the user's config screen and change their "Home Directory" to the folder you want to use.

My only concern is, everything I keep reading about nas and nas hard drives leads me to believe the file system is meant to run 24/7.

Correct. Whether or not powerdown will actually work is highly hardware dependent and you won't really know whether or not it will work on your particular hardware until you try.

Right now I have a PC with a 4tb drive and a 1tb drive, 2 TB USB 1tb USB, all scattered...with individual volumes.

If that's what your planning to use for disks, FreeNAS is probably not the best solution. If you plan on having any redundancy, you want to use drives of equal sizes and USB drives aren't well supported.