Thinking aloud here.
I have a Pi that is used for torrents, TV recording and media server. I also have a couple of spare (powered) USB drives I could use as a NAS without spending any cash. I'm wondering the best way of doing this. I am aware that it won't be the fastest ever NAS btw:) One drive is a 2TB in NTFS and the other is something like 250Gb VFAT. I'd like to make it that both drives can be unplugged and plugged into a Windoze PC if needed, so formatting them in ext4 is a no go. I think I could get them both as NTFS for some consistency.
It needs to be simple for some of the family. I'm currently thinking of having one Samba share folder with both drives mounted within that so you should (hopefully) on a Windows PC you see one folder marked as network drive (or whatever) and within that folder two sub folders for the drives and all of their folders within in the usual tree type layout. Does this make sense or is there a better way? I was thinking of doing a RAID with the two drives but how would that work here with two drives of different capacity that may (or may not) be attached to the Pi all the time?
The idea is to have shared storage as opposed to backup. Backup we do by having an additional drive in each of our PC's and photos etc are backed up in more than one place. Any thoughts? Thanks