OS For old Hackintosh

[WyzrdX]

I recently upgraded my IvyBridge customac to a new Haswell build. I dual boot Win 8.1 and Mavericks. 8.1 for some games not available on Mac and Mavericks for everything else.

In our home we have my CustoMac dual boot, an ATV3, Roku 3, and Samsung Smart Blu-Ray, 2 iPads (4 and Air), a Haswell MBA, a windows 8.1 Laptop, an older windows 7 Dell AIO (sons), and a 2010 iMac (daughters). As you can see we have a mixed household.

Here is my dilemma.

I have been using a Synology DS412+ for the past 2 years for all of our devices. I was running PMS for media as well as file sharing for both windows and OSX. Then out of nowhere the board in the DS412+ quits. Data is safe with backups to External USB drives but I am now without file sharing.

I have the old IvyBridge system in my sig sitting in my closet not being used ATM. I have plenty of hdd's so storage is not an issue. I am wanting to turn this into a server to replace the synology.

I currently have Windows 8.1 installed. I also have the license for OSX, I can get the license for OSX Server, I have a Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2012 Essentials license. I have also looked at XPenology to stay with the Synology DSM.

My question is what OS should I use for the mixed environment? Can OSX (which I prefer) be used as a RELIABLE server for both OSX and Windows? Can Windows 8.1?

I am lost and since there are people here that at least seem to know stuff , I figured I would ask.

Thanks for any help

 

[neuroman]

For file sharing and general server duties I would vote for Windows 8.
With quicksync you can easily transcode video, share files and most other duties you may need.
I have used a Mac Server for a long time and the reason for this is because of the native support for Time Machine backups for whatever that is worth.
I have used server 2008 and 2012 and r2 of both and I have to say they are a total overkill for a home environment.
The performance on the Server 2012 r2 is very impressive and has a lot of very cool features such as multipath networking with windows 8 machines, iSCSI target and other things but setting things up takes some serious dedication.
Depending on how powerful your machine is and if you have time, I would setup a basic ESXi server and I would try a different bunch of operating systems.
Let me know if you need help.

 

[Koalaman]

I vote for FreeNas.

 

[neuroman]

I vote for FreeNas.

FreeNAS is a great NAS OS - with the addons works very well including plex and now plexconnect. The killer missing thing is lack of support for my HD Homerun Prime.
For pure storage porpouses it offers the advantage of ZFS and almost any protocol you may think of.