How Do NAS Drives Work?
Long ago, if you wanted to share files, you copied it to a floppy and gave it to whoever needed it. Simple, effective, but inefficient. How would you share those files with 10 people? Well you'd create 10 floppies. You can see how this isn't any fun once you try to share with a large number of people.
Enter the network. The network allowed PC's, printers, and other devices to "talk" to one another. Along with the network came the concept of the "file share". One PC or server would share it's files with other PC's connected to the network. I'm sure you can see how this is much more efficient than the "sneakernet" described in the first paragraph.
Today's PC's and networks are tens or hundreds of times more powerful than those of 10 years ago. This older technology that worked just fine not long ago is being used in the NAS drives of today.
Today's inexpensive NAS drives are a computer dedicated to sharing files. The CPU's aren't as fast as modern PC's but it's good enough for the sole purpose of sharing files. The small NAS drive computer runs a version of the Linux or FreeBSD operating system using the Windows compatible Samba file sharing system.
With old parts and hard drives you may have laying around your house, you could build your own NAS device using something like FreeNAS as the operating system. It would be a fun little project for those inclined to take up that challenge.
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I’m glad you mentioned FreeNAS, one of the great things about it is that it has features over and above those of a hardware NAS. It includes a media server for streams films and music via any UPnP device (like and XBox 360), an iTunes server and can also do lots of great techie things like iSCSI and RAID (but not just RAID 0,1 & 5 but also 1+0 and 0+1 etc).
Great post. Thanks. Gary