Which NAS distribution?

[MatthewL]

I have a HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer which I bought about 10 years ago which cost me little brand new due to a HP cashback deal, I upped it to 8GB of memory and has basically sat there doing nothing.

 

It had 4 bays plus the drive bay and I want to populate it with some drivers if I can find a suitable raid for it, firstly is it worth it and which NAS distribution would anyone recommend?

 

I want to look at syncing it with a QNAP NAS and will be a bit of a backup of a backup situation at home.

[synaesthesia]

Just set up Truenas and found it very indepth with all the options you could ever need - particularly useful for us at the moment with encryption options

[MatthewL]

Thanks, I had had a quick look that one.

 

Looking into this further I think I'm going to struggle to get a raid card to fit the server which is annoying plus need drives may end up cheaper to just get a NAS off the shelf but will be looking at True NAS.

[synaesthesia]

Truenas like it's predecessor freenas will work best without raid cards - in fact they actively won't work with many at all!

[MatthewL]

Will have a look at my options and costs and go from there.

[computer_expert]

8GB ram is not much for freenas/truenas (due to ZFS). Have you looked at openmediavault? Based on Debian so less greedy in the hardware resources department and can use MD/mdadm software raid too.

 

The P410 raid card will fit in the G7 microserver but heat will be the problem. I pretty much killed the P410 in mine due to overheating.

[atkins]

I'm personally quite a big fan of truenas - has all the features I'll ever need, and more