The first thing I did was throw drives into my PC set up samba and minidlna so my SO and I could stream video to the TV.
But in an online discussion, someone made the argument that it needs to be a dedicated machine with unattended updates with providing storage as its only purpose or something to that effect. That seems overly limiting to me, but that seemed like a pretty common sentiment.
Surely there’s a line somewhere between someone making a share on their PC or attaching a USB drive to their router and a commercial NAS device. I don’t know where that line is, so I tend to be pretty conservative and assume a NAS device is dedicated to the purpose, whether DIY or purchased, but if it runs a bunch of other services, now it’s a “server” and not a NAS.
That’s why I’m suggesting the language here be more precise.
I did not even consider that NAS might refer to a commercial device.
Making a raspberry pi host an always on hard drive with Samba and calling it Network Attached Storage was the first thing I ever self hosted.
Language is weird how it changes.
The first thing I did was throw drives into my PC set up samba and minidlna so my SO and I could stream video to the TV.
But in an online discussion, someone made the argument that it needs to be a dedicated machine with unattended updates with providing storage as its only purpose or something to that effect. That seems overly limiting to me, but that seemed like a pretty common sentiment.
Surely there’s a line somewhere between someone making a share on their PC or attaching a USB drive to their router and a commercial NAS device. I don’t know where that line is, so I tend to be pretty conservative and assume a NAS device is dedicated to the purpose, whether DIY or purchased, but if it runs a bunch of other services, now it’s a “server” and not a NAS.
That’s why I’m suggesting the language here be more precise.