Optiplex home server questions

[Chaos Network]

Now I know the LTT crew has done a video on this in the past, though I can not find it. I have acquired an older dell 7010 optiplex and plan to use it as somewhat of an “external hard drive” server for my personal data. It will only be me accessing it, and I have no worries about sensitive data as I Dont intend to keep any on there. That said I only plan to access this from my main desktop (windows 11) and am curious if just making the drive(s) network shared on windows or a Linux setup would be better/easier. I have never really used Linux before so I’ll have absolutely 0 idea what I’m doing.

[Levent]

Linux based OS make better file servers (and better servers in general). If you have no clue about what you are doing, then stick to what you know then experiment if you want down the line.

[m9x3mos]

3 minutes ago, Chaos Network said:

Now I know the LTT crew has done a video on this in the past, though I can not find it. I have acquired an older dell 7010 optiplex and plan to use it as somewhat of an “external hard drive” server for my personal data. It will only be me accessing it, and I have no worries about sensitive data as I Dont intend to keep any on there. That said I only plan to access this from my main desktop (windows 11) and am curious if just making the drive(s) network shared on windows or a Linux setup would be better/easier. I have never really used Linux before so I’ll have absolutely 0 idea what I’m doing.

Even though you don't have experience with Linux, I would try truenas scale. 

It is free and can (not recommend) use single drives. 

It is also pretty easy to setup and there are a lot of tutorials on it that you can find on YouTube.