Windows OS Instalation | USB ext. HDD

Hey,

Wasn't quite sure which category in which to pose my question as it envelopes a number of topics. Apologies if I have chosen wrongly.

I'm flirting with ideas of turning an unused Seagate USB desktop HDD into any sort of NAS drive. So far I done two things respectively:

Plugged the HDD into my router via USB
Works well enough as extra storage with network availability

Window OS installed on said drive

I was wondering if there is there a way emulate a real NAS and more importantly provide it with its own network interface.

Is this doable considering the ext HDD. does not have its own cpu or have serving capabilities?

Thank you

"I was wondering if there is there a way emulate a real NAS and more importantly provide it with its own network interface."

 

Sorry Manicd, I can't see how that is possible and also, a normal HDD will never emulate a real NAS drive as that is a completely different animal!

 

Sorry Manicd, I can't see how that is possible

neither can i.

 

 

a normal HDD will never emulate a real NAS drive as that is a completely different animal!

not sure what you mean by that though lee.

 

i think of a nas as just a dedicated pc running as a headless server.

usually you need 1 dedicated drive for the os only to run on (some people put the os on a memory stick.) and then you also need other drives to store the data on. the drives themselves can be any old drives, but of course for reliability you'd probably want to use enterprise drives like wd reds.

 

a link explaining enterprise vs consumer drive failure rates :- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

 

to be honest though in my opinion unless you need more storage space or redundancy, then i don't see any real advantages in trying to set up a nas over the solution your using now, besides the fact there's no way to have nas storage without actually building/using a dedicated pc of some type (rasberry pi's are popular i believe.) to run the nas software on and connect the storage drives to first.

 

 

if you want to build a low powered nas though then here's a couple of links might be of interest to you :-

http://www.htpcbeginner.com/htpc-nas-combo-build-2016/

http://www.techradar.com/how-to/computing/how-to-build-your-own-raspberry-pi-nas-1315968/1