Building a file server/NAS

[postaled]

I've been sitting on full hard drives now for a while and I generally dislike deleting anything besides temp files so I have been looking into building a file server/NAS.

Just wondering which distro or OS in general you'd say would be best(I am looking to not pay for an OS)

Also because I already have a little over 3TB of data I'd probably be looking to buying 5x2TB drives and throwing them into a raid array of sorts so I would have a year or two more before having to upgrade.

I'd probably end up using a Phenom x4 BE in the machine considering I have one lying around right now.

Not sure how well Samba interacts with windows still or if there is a different alternative. Would actually be nice to have it run PS3 media server also(runs on linux for sure)


Any thoughts/advice would be awesome.

 

[Nothinman]

Whatever you're comfortable with, Samba is the same on all of them. I'd go with Debian personally, but that's just my preference because I don't really like most of the automagic stuff that Ubuntu has been doing lately. And for a filesystem that big I'd suggest using XFS, but whatever distro you choose you'll probably want to setup the RAID array and filesystem after the initial installation.

 

[sourceninja]

If it is just going to be a NAS, I'd look at one of the wonderful NAS based distro's out there. FreeNas, Openflier, NexentaStor, TurnKey, etc.

 

[Khyron320]

I would go with ZFS for raidz (which is raid5 essentially)

You can improve performance of ZFS by adding more ram and a L2ARC DRIVE.
In fact anandtechs own file server storage runs off ZFS. They have an article about it.

for a better comparison here is the linux version of ZFS compared to native file systems. Keep in mind native ZFS on solaris is faster than fuse ZFS:

Also please note random write performance across the board is terrible on ZFS.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=zfs_fuse_performance&num=4

I would go with freenas and tune ZFS.

i have been running btrfs 2tb vs 4tb ZFS and zfs is for sure slower. But im running 1gb ram and the system is going into swap. ZFS def needs ALLOT of ram.

 

[postaled]

Thanks for the responses. I'll definitely be checking out FreeNas and Openfiler later tonight when I have some time.