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For the small cost of buying or putting together a dedicated backup server, above the price of the hard drives which youre already getting it only makes sense to go that way IMO. Also it is very convenient to have the server available 24/7 fully independant of your main rig, for reasons such as reduced noise, lower continous power draw, accessibility, the fairly limited resources that are needed but wont impact gaming or other at all, etc... Pi or similar are a great base level option though somewhat limited in transfer speeds over Ethernet in particular. And if you can push a little higher you can put something together very strong for around 5x the cost of a pi.

Dude it looks like youve not checked the minimum specs or really scoped out what you need for freenas. Maybe take a step back and look at what youre trying to do first?

I'm with the OPs plan. As much as I would naturally say 'you shouldnt have bought Apple' we live in a world where things come in different formats and things read in different formats, the good thing is they can be transcoded easy enough. Plex is awesome. Motherboard really doesnt matter at all so long as it has the connections you need, id just pick whatever combo that has a CPU upwards of 3Ghz and at least dual core and fits your budget. Shouldnt have any problems unless your seriously tight for money.

Some of the points here make it look a lot scarier than it actually is. The question simply has to be, is learning to use linux/debian (even if your using freeNAS) and the complexities behind storage and networking something you are interested in doing? You can go from having never had your own diy NAS before to having a network storage solution within an hour or two at most, theres plenty guides out there, but it will take years to 'learn' effectively the stuff that otherwise synology et al. is doing behind the interface. If its not something you want to 'learn', buy prebuilt. Id encourage the former though.

As i said the learning side makes complete sense, but hes asked for a super basic thing. I've no doubt if your building a server farm etc youd do it, but hes building a fancy nas.

And if you follow the discussion hes talking about significantly more VM's, which is quite obviously what i was responding to. Even so the idea that seperating those items to VM's on the same pysical device, on the same network, with likely very similar authentication vulnerabilities, and likely cross access to data somehow makes you safer is simply not true. This provides little to no extra security unless implemented perfectly.

Rent a virtual server/droplet to host the TS server. Cheaper than the vpn, full bandwidth, let them deal with ddos. Either way you cant prevent ddos if someone wants to get you, just dont make them want to get you.

You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be with vm's with little to no actual benefot beyond learning. The purpose you identified that requires a VM is that you want to play woth multiple OS's; however you seem to have got confused about adding all services to seperate VM's which is not particularly logical at all - it provides no real security benefit (particularly as you likely end up usibg the same login across them all) and means youve got a massive PITA to update it and manage it all. The uses you described can all be achieved on a single machine, there may be slight benefit to multiple vms for restricting resources but i wouldnt. Keep the vm's for testing and playingand remember you can still screw anything system wide.

Its possible provided the hardware is appropriate with multiple ethernet adapters but for me it doesn't make sense, just get/make a cheap system and use it like you would a 'normal' router. In terms of security issues its the standard discussion about a software firewall or a hardware one - the threat physically reaches the devices you're supposed to be protecting and therefore there's additional potential the network could be comprimised - but still very unlikely.

As much as everyone is right in saying to use the server completely headless, and I certainly do for all mine, its understandable for new potential converts to OS's like linux that it could be scary or could make you feel powerless (terminal isn't like cmd line in windows - its actually the most powerful way you can use the system) so provided this isn't anything life threatening / commercial id fully recommend using desktop ubuntu. Get yourself a feel for it and gradually get used to using terminal for everything instead of the gui. Its certainly an attack vector and you should know that you shouldn't have a gui, but realistically the benefit of you enjoying the linux experience outways the risk on the short term IMO.

Granted you're correct however I don't believe your reasoning even vaguely matches the OP's situation. Seems like a pretty basic set of requirements and for that an ssd will in all likelihood appear to perform identically to a reasonable quality hdd. I get (as far as is noticeable) instant response on all of my storage arrays, and they're hdds in raid6.

You don't want it all to be wireless. You just took a complex system with the potential to have unreasonable latency, and added in a connection method thaf amplifies the primary negative of the setup - latency. If you can't do this wired, be very careful about how much time and money you invest in this.

How? You can't fit anything more through the ethernet cable. Even if you have an infinitely fast ssd, no more Data can be sent through the ethernet cable. Unless you have teaming set uo or similar which is a whole other question.

I picked up ubuntu desktop to use a server os a while ago and have picked up headless versions of various debian derivs pretty easily since (for my use). I find windows server more daunting now, primarily because I don't feel the great user feature set that makes desktop windows so great translates well to the server environment - doing stuff in the graphical ui seems just really clunky and cmd is well, not great. For the things you mentioned at the start you want to do, you should be able to find easy to follow step by step guides for linux, which you'd probably have to follow for windows anyway. And once you get a bit of confidence with terminal you'll realise its all you ever needed and is actually quite simple.

I need to look into flexraid, this sounds like the best storage redundancy approach for personal media.