You've heard the word "server" thrown around a lot, but usually in the context of web sites or big companies that have a lot of data to store. In reality, a server can be just as useful in your home. In this guide, we'll walk through how to create your own home server out of an old or cheap computer that can do all your downloading, streaming, and backup tasks 24/7.Note: If this post looks familiar, it's because we've covered FreeNAS before. Our old guide used FreeNAS 7, which is great, but the new FreeNAS 8 makes installing plugins for BitTorrent, media streaming, Usenet, and other tasks much easier. If you want to check out FreeNAS 7—now called NAS4Free—you can still view our old guide here. Alternatively, if you don't want to use FreeNAS, you can put together a similar setup using Ubuntu.
What Does a NAS or Home Server Do?
Network Attached Storage—or NAS for short—is basically a set of hard drives connected to your network, so any computer in your house can access them. This is great for bigger households or people with multiple computers (like a home theater PC) that all need to access the same data. They're also usually quite low power and low cost, and they don't require a monitor, mouse or keyboard—once you've installed the software, you can configure every aspect of your NAS from a web browser on your other computers. read more details>>>