Using Windows computer as file server for Macbook?

charlesatlas

I've got over 20 terabytes of files on external drives, etc. that I want to consolidate on a single machine. With expansion on Apple being more expensive (8-bay Thunderbolt or NAS enclosures cost a fortune), I'm thinking of building a Windows tower, stuffing it with lots of internal HDDs and using it as a file server through file sharing, maybe with the disks formatted in HFS+ as it's supposed to be more robust than NTFS because of its journaling. That means I would need Paragon's HFS+ for Windows software to allow the Windows machine to read and write to those drives. Anybody have any experience with this software? Will this convoluted path (MBP over network to Windows on shared disks running HFS) work, or should I consider something like building a DAS enclosure using an old computer case, power supply, SFF-8088 SAS adapters, Thunderbolt to SAS adapter and other parts, which doesn't seem it would be any simpler?

mpantone

Why waste a Windows PC -- especially a custom build -- on what appears to be a mundane file server?

Just buy a Synology NAS or roll your own with a Raspberry Pi 4. Linux has free HFS+ and ExFAT filesystem extensions -- both have been available for the Linux kernel since the late Nineties so they are quite mature. I'm sure there's one for NTFS as well.

Hell Canakit's $99 Raspberry Pi 4 kit at Amazon is cheaper than a Windows 10 retail license. You'll save money on electricity as well since the Pi runs a Broadcom ARM SoC and not some power-sucking Intel or AMD silicon.

charlesatlas

It would be older hardware that I already have, Haswell vintage, so I wouldn't have to pay anything for it. I have everything in my parts box, including motherboard, CPU, RAM, PS, hard drives, case with a lot of drive bays, etc. A legitimate Win10 Pro license can be bought on eBay for less than $10, which I've done for other machines previously. That's cheaper than a Pi kit, and a hell of a lot cheaper than an 8-bay Synology that goes for almost $1000. And it could also serve double duty as a Windows machine when I need to run apps not available for Macs.

mpantone

I am now completely baffled by this inquiry.

You are quite confident that you have all the necessary used parts on hand to make this happen, thus costing you nothing out of pocket for hardware. You also claim to have access to a cheap and legitimate source for a Window license.

And you are asking to do something -- share files hosted on a Windows machine to other machines -- that corporate IT staffers have been doing for 30+ years, even those incompetents with unquestionable lack of mastery of technology. Hell, I've shared files from my Windows PC to Macs on my home subnet with almost no effort and I know nearly zilch about Windows. While my memory is extremely foggy, I'm pretty sure I shared Linux filesystems to both Macs and Windows clients on the same subnet way back in the late Nineties as well.

I will bet a buffalo nickel that at least one person on this planet of 8+ billion people has written detailed instructions on how to set up a Wintel box as a file server accessible to Macs, Linux boxes, whatever.

That's basically what you are asking, aren't you? Or are you trying to do something special that you have yet to properly describe?

Regardless I am convinced that any further participation in this discussion on my part is a big waste of time and I hereby bow out of this thread.

Best of luck.

charlesatlas

You're right. You don't understand what you're responding to. Yes, I have the hardware. Yes, I can probably buy the Win10 license key cheap, and it's probably a volume license key. I never said otherwise about any of that. It's all your bad assumptions, like assuming I'd want to pay $1000 for a NAS enclosure when I wrote in the first post that such enclosures cost too much. Like assuming that I want to deal with NTFS when I already said that the increased robustness of HFS+ journaling is preferable. Or assuming the CanaKit can somehow act as a file server when it has no SATA connectors, drive bays or power supply for hard drives.

I'm not asking about file sharing from Windows. That's relatively simple stuff, sure, although still not as simple as you think. File sharing changed a lot between Win7 and Win10 and caused quite a few headaches. It's the additional layer of HFS+ for Windows on top of file sharing that I asked about, which I'm sure corporate IT staffers don't deal with on a regular basis.

What I don't understand is your attitude problem. I gave straightforward answers to your assumptions and you respond with snark as if I'm a complete idiot.

Marvin

charlesatlas said:

It would be older hardware that I already have, Haswell vintage, so I wouldn't have to pay anything for it. I have everything in my parts box, including motherboard, CPU, RAM, PS, hard drives, case with a lot of drive bays, etc. A legitimate Win10 Pro license can be bought on eBay for less than $10, which I've done for other machines previously. That's cheaper than a Pi kit, and a hell of a lot cheaper than an 8-bay Synology that goes for almost $1000. And it could also serve double duty as a Windows machine when I need to run apps not available for Macs.

Given the PC, you are choosing between putting HFS+ drives in the PC with compatibility software vs using a 3rd party NAS or DAS with a different filesystem.

Most NAS systems won't use HFS+ (they seem to prefer ext4), some disk enclosures (DAS) support HFS+ but typically not in a RAID format and without RAID they'd mount as separate drives.

If you really need HFS+ extended attributes, using the PC looks like the better option. I wouldn't personally rely on using something like Paragon with 20TB of files:

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1931869
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/timely-warning-about-paragon-hfs-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

The most compatible setup would be a hackintosh which would allow using HFS+ in RAID but another filesystem would be ok to use as long as it preserved extended attributes. These attributes are things like file labels, comments, quarantine info:

https://softwaretested.com/mac/what-are-mac-file-extended-attributes-and-how-to-remove-and-use-them/

According to this site, most filesystems should preserve them but once you factor in the network share, the attributes can get removed at the copy stage:

https://eclecticlight.co/2018/01/12/which-file-systems-and-cloud-services-preserve-extended-attributes/

Copying a file to an NTFS drive removes the Mac file labels so it doesn't look like it preserves all the attributes.

Another aspect to consider is speed. If you have 20TB of files and they are big files, it's good to have a fast connection to them. If it's going to be over wifi, that's going to be pretty slow. If it's wired, maybe using a DAS would be a better option (like the Pegasus ones that Apple sells).

https://www.amazon.com/OWC-ThunderBay-External-Enclosure-Thunderbolt/dp/B079J27BFT
https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Elite-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B07C225L18
https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-External-Enclosure-Aluminum-Diskless/dp/B07XQ3CPSG
https://www.amazon.com/TerraMaster-D5-300C-Enclosure-Exclusive-Diskless/dp/B06ZY6DK8N

8TB drives are around $150-200:

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-Drive-3-5-Inch/dp/B07H289S7C

so you could build a 32TB DAS with 4 drives and an enclosure for around $1000 vs $3k for a 32TB Pegasus. OWC offers some similarly priced options with 32TB at $1399:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/09/owc-mercury-elite-pro-thunderbolt-dock-offers-28tb-drive-capacity

- I wouldn't recommend relying on custom drivers like Paragon, those are mainly suitable for occasional drive access
- if preserving extended attributes isn't important, a standard NAS or NTFS RAID would be ok
- if preserving extended attributes is important, the filesystem used needs to support the Mac's extended attributes, ext4/zfs may be suitable for this
- if speed is important, a DAS system would be better and can be setup as a compatible RAID using SoftRAID

Since you have some drives already, I think something like the 4-bay OWC diskless enclosure would be a good option. You can check with their support to see if it would work for what you need regarding the filesystem formats. If you go with the PC, you can do a test by setting up a Windows install on an SSD boot drive and put one drive in and test different formats to see which formats preserve the data you need and test the connection speed.

charlesatlas

Thanks, Marvin. I considered making the machine a Hackintosh as an option, having built them in the past. The motherboard is a Gigabyte, and those are known to be pretty OSX86-compatible. The process should be easier nowadays, but there's still the niggling problem of OS updates often breaking the install. Then again, if this is only to be a file server, I can just leave it at a comfortable version forever, even if it's outdated like Mojave or even El Capitan, and not worry about updates.