A euphemism for talking about a hard drive away from us, but that we can use, is cloud storage. Today we have a number of services that give us space to store our files and that the storage unit of our PC or mobile phone does not lack. Today we are going to show you that there is the alternative of Turn your old PC into a cloud storage server.
Most people switch computers long before their old system breaks down and throws it away. In a world where environmental awareness is increasingly important, it is important to reduce waste. And we don’t say it because the ecological vein came out of us. Rather, it’s because we’re tired of seeing how hardware that works perfectly and is still in use gets totally thrown away, which is a shame.
What to do with a recently decommissioned computer?
Our advice is that unless portability is essential in your daily work, when choosing a new computer, make it as modular as possible. In other words, completely avoid systems that typically mount things like the power supply and case in an integrated fashion or have a component or peripheral that only works with said setup.
We say this due to the fact that many people have the mistake of throwing away their PC case, for example, and unless we opt for a larger type of motherboard or the length of our new graphics card is greater to the depth of the tower. stupid to throw these pieces at the fret. Instead, we’ll need a good cleaning of the case, fans, and power supply. In the latter case, we need to ensure that it provides enough power for our new system and that the warranty period has not been exceeded.
Although it is also possible that you had to change the whole computer. So your old PC may be complete. Well, one of the new uses you can give it is to make it a storage device accessible via the local network or the Internet. Which is ideal if you don’t trust cloud storage services or simply need more capacity than they offer. That is, your own alternative to services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Mega, etc.
Turn it into a cloud storage server
TrueNAS is a totally free operating system, which is a variant of FreeBSD that can turn a PC into a network-accessible storage device. Therefore, it will allow us to be able to access from any device and correctly configured the content that your hard drives or SSDs have inside. In addition to serving you to be able to store everything you want, including backup copies.
The advantage of installing it in a tower PC is that these have several bays from which to install several storage units and several SATA ports for it. However, it is recommended to install the operating system on a separate SSD drive. As for the requirements to be able to turn your old PC into a cloud storage server, the requirements are:
- A processor with 8 GB of memory
- 8 GB of RAM, if it is ECC type then it is a plus. Although we assume you won’t, as this is typically used in servers and workstations.
- The storage drive you are installing TrueNAS on cannot be used for storage, so you will need multiple drives. Our recommendation is a cheaper SATA SSD.
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet speed on the motherboard.
Remember, we’re not talking about being able to work remotely, so if you need to work with a file, you’ll still need to download it to your computer from your new storage server.
