Setting up some sharing, samba, or NAS?

[Bobby Doogle]

I'm looking to setup some basic home file sharing. I have an 8tb drive on the way which I will half fill with existing music and photos/videos. I want to be able to access these photos/music/videos from a handful of windows and linux computers, android devices, and perhaps a roku if possible. My ideal scenario would allow me to play folders of music (rather then songs), initiate slideshows of images, and play individual video files. I was playing around with a samba share on an Ubuntu machine and this seemed to work fairly well. My question is do I get many benefits for my use case of installing a full fledged NAS OS like freeNAS? What file format should I format my hard drive for best compatibility, I understand NTFS is windows/linux compatible, but I'm not sure this matters if I access files with samba. Should I consider some entirely different approach to this? Thanks in advance.

 

[RMerlin]

My personal advice would be to get a second 8 TB hard drive, and get an entry-level NAS from QNAP , Synology or Asustor. Having two disks will allow you to put them in mirror, so if one fails, you won't be losing 8 TB of valuable content.

If not quite ready for the investment in a second HDD + NAS, an entry-level single drive solution like the QNAP TS-128A is worth considering due to its low price. Will be much easier to setup and manage than going down the DIY route (unless you intend to use that as a learning experience).

If you still prefer to share from a computer, the main benefit of something like FreeNAS is ease of management.

You're right, the filesystem does not matter over SMB. However if sharing off a Linux-based system, it's best to use a native filesystem, like ext4/XFS/BTRFS/etc... NTFS support under Linux is quirky at best.