[essjay]

Hi guys,

I'm coming very close to rebuilding my media storage machine. It's as follows:

Windows 7 Enterprise N
FlexRAID for pooling
i5-2405S
16GB RAM
2 x 3TB HDD
3 x 2TB HDD
1 x 1TB HDD (OS)
APC UPS

My clients are as follows
Dune HD D1
Mede8er 1000X3D
HTPC running latest Kodi


So currently this machine has quite a few jobs such as torrents, Crashplan, SEO software. I want to change this and convert the machine to be a NAS/Fileserver only and I don't want any software (such as torrents) eating bandwidth. My aim is to try and increase speed in and out of the machine and it's connected to a 1GB switch. I don't want to purchase any further hardware apart from a dedicated network card if I have to.

The motherboard has 6 SATA slots but only two are 6Gbps I think. Not going Windows would allow me to possibly run an OS from a USB key and so allowing me to replace the 1TB OS drive with a 2TB drive sitting here on my desk.

While I think FlexRAID is very good I've noticed a few issues.

1. The storage pool doesn't always start up after a reboot
   
2. Sometimes my Dune can't read the share and I have to reboot the machine
   

Both of these issues could be Windows related though.

So what is the recommend OS for a pure NAS/Fileserver? I want this machine to do nothing but sit pretty and share files across my home network, be speedy and reliable. I'll want storage pooling and some sort of redundancy (software based as I'm not buying a RAID card).

Appreciate any input.

[albertstroh77]

Linux is what you want.

[poplap]

Linux is good for this. I like Open Media Vault (its what I am using right now), nice web interface and it runs on Debian system. It has support for software raid, LVM, even SnapRAID. It will do more than you need but it works well as just a file server. Could also take a look at FreeNAS, its a little more complicated, it uses ZFS too and is FreeBSD based instead of linux. I used it for a while too till the OS drive failed and I upgraded (Downgraded??) to a Raspberry Pi running Open Media Vault.

[essjay]

Yes my current thinking is some flavour of Linux with software RAID for pooling whether that be FlexRAID again or something like unRAID.

OpenMediaVault is another option. Tell me can you use different size drives? Don't think you can with FreeNAS. Also with OMV is the drive readable in other OSs like FlexRAID or unRAID?

[poplap]

No RAID lets you mix different drive size (there are hacks like using partitions to make larger drives smaller, this is what synology uses). Standard RAID uses same size disks (or larger ones though the space will not be available) and then ether strips, mirrors, or does parity. SnapRAID is similar to FlexRAID in that it can have different sizes (look at the website it has a good comparison). There is experimental support for greyhole which is another FlexRAID/unRAID/SnapRAID like system. ZFS is more advance, it has its own RAID like system called zraid which follows traditional raid ideas then it can pool them all together (you will probably need to do more research). OVM is just linux with a nice web gui and automated tools, nothing special, it relies on other software and filesystems for storage. It can share on SMB, NFS, Webdav, etc. You can even install flexraid on OMV since its just Linux (they even have tut). Honestly you're going to have to do research for what best fits your needs.

Considering your level of experience I would probably not use FreeNAS since its more complicated (though still has a nice web gui FreeBSD can be a bit picky), unless you want a challenge of course