Home file server advice

[okolepuka]

So I have a bunch of Hard Drives around with movies and music, etc. and wanted to set up a dedicated file server. I have a Mavericks hackintosh, a couple win8 machines, win7. I have lots of assorted PC parts, enough to build a decent file server. I have done some reading, but do have some questions:

--Am I limited by the amount SATA connectors on the MOBO as to how many drives I can RAID? What about the USB connectors?

--Whats the best server OS for compatibility--NAS, Ubuntu, OSX, Win? The HDs I want to RAID are formatted DOS, but also some Mac formatted--will these all work together?

Anyhow, thanks so much.

 

[rjstott]

I can talk about unRaid which I chose because I wanted a solution to work with Video Media. It works with mixed drive sizes, it may have the highest ratio of data to redundancy that there is but it's not the fastest server. It is being developed to embrace VM so that it can run a number of other server solutions without the problems of compatibility.

It is limited to one drive per SATA port but I've used spare IDE ports with adapters to increase the count. There is a free version for up to two drives plus parity which currently would offer around 8TB. It runs Linux but I believe you can run OS X in a VM.

At the end of the day it depends a lot on what the server is for. For me it is not a backup but a repository for large collections of media which are replaceable with effort. It is a first point of call for backup but not the ultimate long term solution.

Whilst the lots of mixed drives sounds ok, I've found that adding a new large drive removes the hassle of failing small drives. All drives are re-formatted with ReiserFS.

 

[dougoftheabaci]

My suggestion would be Ubuntu or Mint, personal preference there. But either is going to work exceptionally well. They're both very popular, very well supported and will be easy to find guides for.

For the actual storage component, I'd vote for ZFS. You could do a hardware RAID but they're very expensive and RAID5 has issues. You could go RAID10, but you'd need loads of drives for that. ZFS isn't as fast as a hardware RAID, but it's still pretty quick. I transfer over my network to my server at around 100 MB/s (over ethernet), which is more than enough for most things. ZFS is also really stable and very well supported under Linux at this point, though you'll need a separate volume to boot from (though you should do that anyway).

You might also want to set up stuff like Webmin, Plex Server and stuff like Dropbox if you use it. All of that kind of stuff works really easily on Ubuntu.

 

[Wingfat]

You may want to check out FreeNAS....I built two file servers based upon FreeNas with ZFS. It is rock solid with many features and a GUI. You can thank me later

 

[donsjgm]

I have UBUNTU but I like SUSE better although thus far I don't have either one configured to a fully up and running server. I like the KDE GUI with SUSE and the development gets better with time. Ultimately I hope to end up with a better system but if you need it right now UBUNTU is farther along with debugging.