Repurposing W7 box as NAS.. Questions/advice

[ddiehl]

Here's the situation..

I have tons of music/videos/photos stored across several computers in my home. I have a spare Windows 7 machine that I'd like to install about 4 large hard drives ranging in size from 2 to 6 tb and use that as central storage and for my other computer, and streaming to several Nexus Players running XBMC.. I’m not looking for cloud Storage, web server, mobile access or any like that. I don't need any kind of RAID as I'm backing up everything between my desktop with equal storage and the repurposed box..

I've been reading a lot about FreeNas, but don't know if I'm up to the task in terms of configuring when I could just set up a Windows 7 machine, share the drives and be done with it. To simplify things each drive would be dedicated to the media being stored on it. 1 drive would have video/movies only, 1 would have music only, etc, with a matching drive on my desktop to keep everything in sync for backup purposes..

Thoughts?

EDIT: Looks like FreeNas is out due to the fact that the machine only has 4gigs of ram as opposed to the required 8..

 

[doctore]

Nothing wrong with sharing the drives, but keep in mind that your computer will have to be on all the time
You may want to just shell for a dedicated NAS.