NAS4Free is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD designed for managing network-attached storage devices. The program can be installed on virtual and physical machines. It comes equipped with a user-friendly web interface.

General notes

The main advantage of using this utility is its support for exchanging data between a variety of platforms and systems, such as Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix. The list of supported protocols and services includes the following:

FTP;
NFS;
Bittorent:
VirtualBox;
noVNC;
UPnP;
Samba and more.

It is necessary to mention that the tool works with RAIDZ 2 and 3 arrays, is capable of performing S.M.A.R.T checks, provides powerful data encryption, and can send storage activity reports to your email address.

Setup

The software distribution comes in the form of a bootable image that may be burned to a removable media of your choice, either optical disc or USB flash drive. It is possible to start the system in six different modes, namely ACPI enabled, normal, verbose logging, GUI support, update and restore. If you need to manage multiple operating systems on your computer, you may use a variety of applications, like EasyBCD, GRUB4DOS Installer or BootDiskUtility, for example.

Features

free to download and use;
compatible with modern Windows versions;
gives you the ability to manage NAS storage;
requires creation of a bootable media device;
you can launch the OS in different modes.