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Forum Discussion
Turning RN104 into an external enclosure
Is there anyway I can turn RN104 into an external NAS enclosure - I would like to populate it with 2TB-4TB NTFS disks with data and share/serve the content on internal LAN? Not interested in RAID - th...
BTRFS and EXT4 are not proprietary filesystems (NTFS is proprietary though...), any linux can read it given the right configuration. I personally advise to use fedora live CD as they are one of the most updated distribution regarding BTRFS filesystem.
I think ReadyNAS uses mdadm for the raid and not a hardware raid, so that you could have your disks back and running using the fedora if you were to have a NAS failure.
When you are sharing over the network, the filesystem doesn't count, it is about the protocol. For Windows probably CIFS or SMB depending on how you want to call it.
What you want to do is not totally impossible but it is not advised. It would require having a first disk with ReadyNAS OS to boot from. Then it would imply rebuilding manually all the configuration file and maybe modifying the SQLite DB. You would have no way to use most of the function of the NAS because the web interface would be broken (it would erase your configuration and crash if you call a function that can't be done, like snapshot or defrag). No snapshots, no Netgear packaged applications, no Netgear support. Moreover, performance may be impacted as NTFS is not a native linux filesystem. Basically it would imply disabling anything that is not Debian stock (another way to do it would be to replace the ReadyNAS OS with a plain old debian, just keeping the Netgear kernel, but this is even harder to do).
Just mounting the disk and sharing it directly is not possible as the configuration would be erased quite often.
You always can buy enclosures and plug them in USB, this would work.
No NAS will do what you want as they need an operating system to work, exactly like your computer needs windows. There is actually only one way to do it : have your own OS. Plug the disks into a computer and share them from it. That's the only way I know to do it. On a NAS this would mean fight the NAS OS and struggle to keep your manual configuration over their configuration that is often rebuilt entirely at each update.
If you could tell us what you exactly want, we may be able to help. I'm not really seing your point as BTRFS doesn't prevent the recovery (Actually it adds mechanism that keep the data safe like snapshots and data checksum) and you won't notice it is BTRFS underneath. Once you have setup your users and shares you are done with the ReadyNAS interface, you use the plain old windows explorer.
I think ReadyNAS uses mdadm for the raid and not a hardware raid, so that you could have your disks back and running using the fedora if you were to have a NAS failure.
When you are sharing over the network, the filesystem doesn't count, it is about the protocol. For Windows probably CIFS or SMB depending on how you want to call it.
What you want to do is not totally impossible but it is not advised. It would require having a first disk with ReadyNAS OS to boot from. Then it would imply rebuilding manually all the configuration file and maybe modifying the SQLite DB. You would have no way to use most of the function of the NAS because the web interface would be broken (it would erase your configuration and crash if you call a function that can't be done, like snapshot or defrag). No snapshots, no Netgear packaged applications, no Netgear support. Moreover, performance may be impacted as NTFS is not a native linux filesystem. Basically it would imply disabling anything that is not Debian stock (another way to do it would be to replace the ReadyNAS OS with a plain old debian, just keeping the Netgear kernel, but this is even harder to do).
Just mounting the disk and sharing it directly is not possible as the configuration would be erased quite often.
You always can buy enclosures and plug them in USB, this would work.
No NAS will do what you want as they need an operating system to work, exactly like your computer needs windows. There is actually only one way to do it : have your own OS. Plug the disks into a computer and share them from it. That's the only way I know to do it. On a NAS this would mean fight the NAS OS and struggle to keep your manual configuration over their configuration that is often rebuilt entirely at each update.
If you could tell us what you exactly want, we may be able to help. I'm not really seing your point as BTRFS doesn't prevent the recovery (Actually it adds mechanism that keep the data safe like snapshots and data checksum) and you won't notice it is BTRFS underneath. Once you have setup your users and shares you are done with the ReadyNAS interface, you use the plain old windows explorer.
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