March 2017, “Community Choice” Project of the Month – NAS4Free

For our March “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected NAS4Free, an embedded Storage distribution for Windows, Mac, & UNIX-like systems.

‘NAS’ stands for “Network-Attached Storage” and it is ‘4Free’ since it is free and open source. It is the simplest and fastest way to create a centralized and easily-accessible server for all kinds of data.

The NAS4Free operating system can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share computer data storage over a computer network. It supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems and includes ZFS, Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports with several different protocols/ services. All this is easily managed by a configurable web interface.

NAS4Free was previously elected “Community Choice” Project of the Month in August of 2015 and the NAS4Free team spoke about the project’s developments and direction. Recently we caught up with the owner, developer and project leader of NAS4Free, Michael Zoon to find out how the project has been doing since then.

SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were voted Project of the Month in August 2015?
Michael Zoon (MZ): First we would like to thank all users who voted NAS4Free for project of the month again.
A vote means more than a thousand words to us. Back to the original question:
We are happy to welcome a new pleasant developer in our team. His name is Michael Schneider and he’s currently rewriting parts of the user interface and is adding improvements to the backend of the underlying operating system.

Another change since 2015 is the phase out of 32-bits versions of NAS4Free. We took the decision with the start of the 11.0.0.4 series based on FreeBSD 11.0. We do believe this is a logical step to provide the full potential of the operating system and the system hardware.

SF: Have any of your project goals changed since then?
MZ: No, our project goal has not changed in the past and we don’t have any plans to change them in the future. We would like to provide one of the best NAS software based solutions on planet earth. We do everything to keep its footprint as small as possible. NAS4Free comes with no bloatware or adverts and does not collect and does not submit any user data or statistic information to the internet. Our hardware requirements are low in comparison to other NAS solutions. NAS4Free performs pretty well on nearly every hardware.

SF: What project goals have you achieved so far?
MZ: We are very proud about the fact that our user base is growing constantly although NAS4Free is not sponsored and not actively promoted in the news, magazine or in the web.

SF: What can we look forward to with NAS4Free?
MZ: NAS4Free’s user interface is in the middle of a rewrite with a new framework and improvements in design. Users who upgrade their systems already noticed positive changes with every release we pull out; those changes will keep coming for a while as this task requires a lot of time and testing before they get published.

SF: Is there anything else we should know?
MZ: NAS4Free is an open source project. We have many volunteers who do all the translations on Launchpad, other volunteers who provide support on our forum and on our IRC channel. We would like to invite everyone who is interested to become a member of the NAS4Free team. With you we can make NAS4Free even more successful.

[ Download NAS4Free ]