FOR RASPBERRY PI:

It is not really recommended to make a NAS with your Raspberry Pi, as the networking is only 100mb up/down. However, you can follow this tutorial by HowToGeek if you are interested. Also, you will need to buy one or two Seagate External Hard Drives for file storage.

UBUNTU SERVER (PC, NUC, SERVER, ETC):

If you haven’t installed Ubuntu Server yet, you need to do that. You can follow my detailed tutorial on how to do that 🙂

Now, you can use this (pretty complicated) tutorial on how to install and configure Samba. If you would like an easier way, I would suggest installing Nas4Free.

INSTALL NAS4FREE ON AN OLD PC, INTEL NUC, SERVER, ETC:

NAS4Free is a lot easier to install and configure compared to running a NAS off of Ubuntu. However, if you install NAS4Free, you will not be able to install other applications on your server such as OwnCloud.

To install NAS4Free on your machine, you can follow my full tutorial 🙂