Two drives; One Tower

[Samuel Spinuzzi]

Hello everybody,

I would like to setup NAS for my home network but I don't necessarily have a complete system to spare and instead I have a spare hard drive laying around that I have hooked up to my tower. My idea here is to install FreeNAS on this drive while still having Windows 10 installed on my main drive. Would I be able to access that drive while on my Windows drive? If anyone has any useful information or has tried anything related I would very much appreciate the help.

Thank you.

 

[melloa]

FreeNAS is installed on one disk or USB stick and windows won't read that format. If you install and boot from a USB, you will have a FreeNAS box with one HD (the extra one). You will be better off adding that HD to your windows, IMHO.

I don't necessarily have a complete system to spare

You will need to get more into the recommended hardware and have a real use for a NAS to invest some $ and time to get it going. Check the resources tab above and you will find lots of information.

 

[Kevin Horton]

FreeNAS isn't an application that you could run under Windows. Think of it as a complete operating system (gross simplification). You need to dedicate a computer to FreeNAS if you are going to use it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Think of it as a complete operating system (gross simplification).

It is a complete operating system. Sure, it's a set of applications running on FreeBSD, but it's distributed as a monolithic package.