What good is a server when it doesn't give access to the disks it contains?
And as my server contains 2.5TB for data-storage, this space has to be made public (in my home-network of course).
I "partitioned" the disks using lvm2 which allows for partitions to come and go, grow and shrink, move and mirror and un-mirror at runtime. Very nice.
As my home network has only one pc dual-booting the other os (once a year when I do taxes), there is no need for samba. I just use nfs4 and can access the published partitions from all the linux-machines.