How can I force Win-7 to index files on a NAS?

Here’s an idea (I have not tested it):

To index a network folder or drive, you must right-click on it first and select “Always Available offline”.
Then it can be indexed, and added to libraries as well.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7files/thread/d6a6cb41-1d66-476c-ab1e-70329dd55cc5

Let us know if it works. I am curious about this, too!

If you look at the details, you can see that this option is not possible. I have 2.7Tb of files on the NAS! How would I store that locally on a laptop?

Ahhh, I understand better. A couple of thoughts:

1)
Here’s a way to add remote shares to a library. I expect it would be slow, and they won’t be indexed, but your machine can search it. I do not know if it would search content and meta-data, or simply file names.
http://zornsoftware.talsit.info/?p=3

2)
Windows Vista, 7, and Server 2003/2008 can act as search servers. Maybe something similar to Windows Search can be added to a Linux-based NAS? Where the indexing and query processing is done on the server and the client just gets the results.

This link is about searching remote indexes from Windows 7.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744682%28WS.10%29.aspx

There is no local indexer I can add to Netgear’s Proprietary OS, but solution 1 looks good, and it’s free! Thanks a lot! I’m downloading it now.