A euphemism to talk 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 some space to store our files and that the storage unit of our PC or mobile phone does not fall short. Today we will show you that there is the alternative of turning 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 do not say it because the ecological vein has come out of us. Rather it is due to the fact that we are tired of seeing how material that works perfectly and is still in use is totally discarded, which is a shame.
What to do with a recently retired 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 those systems that usually mount things like the power supply and the box in an integrated way or that have some component or peripheral that only works with said configuration.
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 than the depth of the tower is silly to throw these pieces to the fret. Rather, what we’re going to need is a good cleaning of the case, fans, and power supply. In the latter case, we must ensure that it gives enough power for our new system and that the warranty period has not been exceeded.
Although it is also possible that you have had to change the entire computer. So your old PC can be complete. Well, one of the new utilities that you can give it is to turn it into a storage device accessible through 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 variation of FreeBSD that can transform a PC into a network accessible storage device. Therefore, it will allow us to be able to access from any device and properly configured to the content that your hard drives or SSDs have inside. Apart from 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 transform your old PC into a cloud storage server, the requirements are:
- A processor with 8 GB of memory
- 8 GB of RAM, if this is of the ECC type then it is a plus. Although we assume that this will not be your case, since this is usually used in servers and workstations.
- The storage drive you install TrueNAS on cannot be used for storage, so you will need to have more than one drive. Our recommendation is a cheaper SATA SSD.
- 1 Gigabit speed Ethernet on the motherboard.
Remember that we are not referring to being able to work remotely, so if you need to work with a file you will still have to download it to your computer from your new storage server.
