Can I plug a NTFS drive in and just share it over the network?

[dbb12345]

Question pretty much says it. I have some drives with data I want to share over the network. Can I just share them without destroying the data?

 

[LarsR]

Nope, truenas only supports zfs as file system, you can plugin other drive formats to import data to a zfs array. But not as a network share.
You have to copy the Data to a dataset on your truenas box and share that dataset.

 

[sretalla]

Xigmanas (which is a fork of FreeNAS a long way back) may offer that feature if you haven't yet decided on a product that meets your needs.

XigmaNAS – XigmaNAS

xigmanas.com

 

[azzad]

I was able to mount an external (USB) 4TB WD NTFS hard drive to my TrueNAS Scale for copying the data from the external NTFS to the internal hard drive. I am not sure if FreeNAS or TrueNAS core also supports that but my motivation was from a user attempting the same for FreeNAS:

How do I mount a NTFS drive so I can copy the data to an empty drive in FreeNAS

Due to limitations with 3TB drives on legacy operating systems, I am now forced to move on to a different platform for my file server. FreeNAS fit the bill, but since importing NTFS drive wont work in the latest stable build, I figured I could mount the NTFS drive that I already have and simply...

www.truenas.com

So here's what I did:
from TrueNAS shell get the name of the disk partition:
fdisk -l

considering the partition name resembles: /dev/sdf2, mount the hard drive to an empty folder in your internal storage as below:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdf2 /mnt/Main/azzad/ntfs

'Main' is the primary pool here. 'azzad' is the user space created for the local NAS user profile. 'ntfs' was the empty folder I created for mounting and copying the data.

I was able to initiate and successfully copy the data from the external to the internal storage from SMB so I do believe you can share your data over the network.

I believe I read somewhere that writing to the NTFS from the mounted location is finicky. I can't attest to that working properly. But if you succeed in writing do let me know as well.