How do you build a share drive?

We have a small office with a staff with 10 employees. Need a shared drive for employees to share graphics and audio content. What would I need to build my own? How much would it cost? Will it be scalable?

If your network already has a server, just create a folder on the server to be shared. In that folder's security settings, set it up so that everyone has access to the folder. Then on the individual machines, map a drive letter to that folder on the server (or add it to the login batch files, if that's how your users log in).

If you don't have a server, you can just use a regular machine on the network. Make sure that it's got enough hard drive space that it can spare some for sharing, then set up the folder as on the server.

The only cost involved is if you end up buying a server or a larger/additional hard drive for a machine to use for sharing.

What do you mean by scalability? Being able to have more people use it in the future? The issues here are the same as for the network as a whole ... if you expect to eventually have more users than you have now, your network will be more manageable with a domain and server than as a peer-to-peer setup. So scalability and cost are related ... if you end up buying more hardware to up-size your network, it'll cost more.

Sorry if that seems vague, but it's hard to say more without knowing more about your network. Hope that helps, though.

Cost would be no more than a new PC; and with the Right Hardware, very Scale-able.

1) Any PC running either linux Samba server or Windows.
With the Windows PC create a foilder on the main drive and share that don't share the root. Alternatively have a seciond drive in the PC and share that.
Sorting out the permissions will be the biggest headache

2) Lacie make a network attached storage device
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/range.h...

With option 1 make sure the Disk is reasonably high speed also have some sort of back up as It will become essential and if it goes down you'll lose a lot of data.

The speed of response will become important so would recommend a gigabit network card in the sharing device and a gigabit switch The client PC's can be 100Mbit if the budget is tight

here is how you access the share drive: *On the desktop, double-click the "My Computer" icon.
*Double-click on "Share on 'Share' (S:)" icon.
*Locate the subject you are trying to locate information for ex. Biology would be located under the "Natural Sciences" (Ns) folder. *The class names should now appear. Now you will need to double-click on the subject (Biology, Chemistry, etc鈥?.
The class information should appear!!