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Here I prepare two hard drives of size 250GB
Of course you can add more hard drives, with larger sizes like 2TB, 4TB depending on your wishes.
In this video, I show you how to turn a VMWare virtual machine into a NAS device with multiple physical hard drives
To create a virtual NAS machine, I use TrueNAS, an open source software
You go to TrueNAS homepage and download the latest installation file
The hypervisor used in this video is VMWare Workstation
Please pay attention to open VMWare software with administrative rights
You create a new Linux virtual machine, name it according to your own liking
I named my virtual machine TrueNAS
Default hard drive is 8GB, you change it to 16GB, that's enough to install TrueNAS operating system
TrueNAS requires a minimum of 8GB RAM, but you can install with just 2GB RAM or 4GB RAM
The more physical hard drives you have, the larger the RAM requirements
Next, browse to the TrueNAS installation iso file downloaded in the previous step
Now the main step I want to show you in this video is adding physical hard drives to the virtual machine
As mentioned at the beginning of the video, I prepared 2 physical hard drives for the NAS virtual machine
Each hard drive is 250GB in size
If your hard drive is formatted then remove it
If you don't remove them, an error will occur when adding them to the TrueNAS virtual machine
Here both my hard drives are formatted so I will remove them all
You add a second hard drive to the virtual machine
You choose the physical hard drive for the virtual machine, with this option you must open VMWare with administrative rights
My computer currently has 3 hard drives, the second and third are for TrueNAS virtual machines
Here Disk1 corresponds to Physical Disk 1
You add a second physical hard drive to the TrueNAS virtual machine similar to the first physical hard drive
Disk 2 corresponds to Physical Disk 2
The virtual machine already has 3 hard drives, including two physical hard drives and one virtual hard drive
You install TrueNAS on a 16GB virtual hard drive and store data on two physical hard drives
Install TrueNAS on a 16GB virtual hard drive
You will be asked to create an admin password, write it down to use in the next step
The default admin account is root
In addition, you can add more hard drives with larger sizes if you want
After the installation is complete, turn off the virtual machine
You remove the virtual machine's CD and DVD because you don't need it anymore
You start the virtual machine to complete the final installation steps
It will take a few minutes to complete the initialization steps
Until the screen appears TrueNAS ip address is successful
You use any web browser and access TrueNAS with the ip address obtained in the previous step
Check if TrueNAS detects two physical hard drives, then configure storage for the NAS device
As you can see TrueNAS detected two physical hard drives just like other physical NAS devices
You configure storage like any other physical TrueNAS device
This way you take advantage of Windows computers and turn them into NAS devices without the need for two independent physical devices
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