Best NAS for Media Server/Backup

[605Scorpion]

I've been meaning to re purpose an old tower as a NAS box as a backup box but keep putting it off 'cause I'm afraid I'll make the wrong set up choice... I'm just gonna roll with something. Drives I've allocated for NAS:
2x Seagate 1TB
6x WD Red 2TB

It will serve as a backup for a laptop running multiple external HDDs. Most of the capacity is for multi GB video files. There is about 300GB worth of smaller files that are a bit more important - photography, financial info, music, PDFs, emails, etc. I want to just occasionally back up to NAS every couple weeks or monthly. I've been looking at my options, but I don't believe I have enough of a background to know which is better. FreeNAS, unRAID, SnapRAID, FlexRAID... I'm more biased towards something running on Linux (as an excuse to start running Linux - I've tried to start running Linux multiple times in the past, but never had a reason to justify keeping it around).

Any reccomendations?

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

I use FreeNAS because of the flexibility but you can try installing Ubuntu LTS and just installing various apps for your server functionality. For the best out of the box experience i would go for freeNAS but for the best security (YOU control exactly what is installed) and no bloatware go for ubuntu with openSSH and samba, and, if you use torrents, deluge. You can also consider Arch if you are opting for the minimalistic approach.

 

[sroberts]

I'm using Open Media Vault on debian and I'm very happy with it. I also tried FreeNAS and thought it was great. I don't think you can go wrong with either, and if you're starting with a fresh system install you don't have a lot to lose by giving each a try. I boot my circa 2004 server from a USB stick and have 2 WD RE class drives to store backups, and a couple of drives that have been "put out to pasture" storing the media.

I'm presently using Plex as the media server. It was a snap to install and works well with debian and OMV. But I'm not too thrilled with Plex so far - it should be called a "media library" instead of server because its focus seems to be organizing and cataloging and it often refuses to serve up video files for reasons as petty as their naming convention.

Id appreciate anyone's recommendations on a Linux based media server that
- works its darnedest to serve up as many media types as possible
- supports a netflix stream via DLNA (I can't stand the lame TV netflix apps)

Steve