After speaking to my old man who spends a lot of time working with his partner in preparing documentation that they constantly email to each other to work on, I suggested getting some kind of small NAS device so they can use that as a share on their respective PCs.
He's really bought into the idea which is great, but I'm a bit stuck what to go for. I dont' want to spend a fortune, but at the same time, want something that's reasonably reliable (as far as the software / management / OS goes), easy to set up.
There are those cheap Freecom NAS drives, but I did read somewhere that they're not Mac OS compliant which suggests you need some software installed on each PC to use the storage. That doesn't sound too good to me - I'd much rather just have a standard CIFS share that any OS can use (he also has a Mac he doesn't use much at the moment, but I wouldn't want the NAS to not be mac compatible).
So then I thought "what about FreeNAS?" or some other streamlined Linux distro suited for this. But my concern is if ever it goes wrong, I'll have to administer it - I'd like to have something he can manage. But on the plus side, I could recycle some of my old hardware which would minimise the cost of the solution.
I then came across some better dedicated NAS boxes which hold one drive. Things like Synology DS108J. That probably looks like the best thing, but it is over £100 for the box / server alone and I'd have to add a harddrive to that (probably have one lying around I could use).
So what do you think?