Everything windows

[Cowl]

Hi everyone
Im new here.


My question is I have a windows server 2008 running. With filezila for ftp. And advances folder share for file sharing on my network.
Is the any sort of bare bone windows system that will do the job. Keep it simple. Server 2008 is old now but does the job. I done use any of the services the windows server has to offer. So any windows will do. Nothing fancy. Themes and all the other stuff is disabled as I use the spare power from that work on file sharing.

I have a raid system with 6drives.

Anyone with any recommendations.

A d not Linux please. Had some bad experiences with there systems so sticking with what I know

 

[Mike]

Even Windows 10 has advanced file sharing. If its RAID and less than 20-30 concurrent connections to the machine, I'm not sure you would have an issue running a client OS for this. Obviously you would want to remove the footprint by blocking lots of ports on the firewall and just using it to store files. I don't recommend going this way but if you can't upgrade to Server 2016 and don't want it anymore you can always give this option a try. If you really want to reduce overhead you could run a cloud-based storage option like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive (Backup & Sync), etc. Depends on what permissions are required on these folders and who should be able to access them.

 

[Cowl]

Hi thanks for the response I will look into server 2016

 

[RuskinF]

IMO the best file server options are un-RAID, FreeNAS, and windows (server), depending on what you want to do. Windows server is probably the easiest to handle for non-Linux people, but also the most expensive. In normal windows, much of the awesome functionality is a bit hidden. Unraid is a great entry-Linux based os, that gives you tonnes of control, if you want it, but also a very easy interface to get a basic server up within minutes. FreeNAS is OpenBSD based and it also allows you to take over pretty much anything you want, but it has a higher barrier of entry and given that it is OpenBSD you can't profit from the vast market shares of windows and Linux