I have a laptop that I'm currently using to dual boot Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.10. Works great... no problems with that part.
I've recently been given a couple of old hand-me-down Dell PCs with moderately sized hard drives to do with as I see fit. As I'm sure most of you know, more storage is always a good thing, so I was playing around with the idea of using these PCs as sort of an external storage drive or server. I have some other hard drives laying around and I was hoping to install Ubuntu on one of the smaller ones, and then use the other two drives from the Dell PCs purely as storage.
I'm relatively certain I could achieve that goal easily enough. My question is how would I go about connecting that "new" PC to my laptop in a way that Windows could not only detect, but also read and write to those two extra hard drives? I mostly want to fill those drives with my music collection to free up some space on my laptop's drive... and maybe back up some important files. So those extra drives would have to act as an external, basically.
I'd thought about turning the desktop into a local server.. which would serve the purpose of backing up my files, but I'm not sure how storing music would work... I also don't really want to have to FTP everything to the drives.
