Which OS for a NAS?

TR0J4N · September 21, 2015

Hi

So I have just been given 4 2TB hardrives and i want to run them in a NAS type pc but am not too sure what to actually install on the pc.

I have windows server 2012 and 2016 available to use or of course linux. The main issue for my indeciveness is that the pc the drives are in at the moment is a really old pc.... its running a 64bit athlon single core at i think 2.2GHz and 1 GB of ddr400 it also has an 80Gb IDE bootdrive this is because the board only has 4 SATA connectors and I figure a IDE drive is faster than running a USB 2.0 boot. I know Linux will be fine running on it but is it worth trying out windows server? and if it is not what distro would you recommend running?

scottyseng · September 21, 2015

Hi

So I have just been given 4 2TB hardrives and i want to run them in a NAS type pc but am not too sure what to actually install on the pc.

I have windows server 2012 and 2016 available to use or of course linux. The main issue for my indeciveness is that the pc the drives are in at the moment is a really old pc.... its running a 64bit athlon single core at i think 2.2GHz and 1 GB of ddr400 it also has an 80Gb IDE bootdrive this is because the board only has 4 SATA connectors and I figure a IDE drive is faster than running a USB 2.0 boot. I know Linux will be fine running on it but is it worth trying out windows server? and if it is not what distro would you recommend running?

Yeah, I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on something so weak. It would end up with you having a lot of headaches.

Hmm, I'm not too good with Linux and I know for sure FreeNAS would not run on that (RAM too low).

Jarsky · September 21, 2015

You cannot run ZFS on such low system resource. You could run Linux with an MDADM array but you wouldn't be able to use advanced features like scrubbing.

It would also take a very long time to rebuild such a big array on such a low amount of memory - you might want to look around and see if you can find more memory for the board if it supports it.

I would probably run OpenMediaVault or Openfiler (for an all in one solution similar to FreeNAS), or i'd use a stripped down Linux without the GUI to keep memory use down - but I guess you may not know how to use the CLI in Linux to build an array and install various protocols and setup firewalls etc..?

You could try Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) if you can find a copy (its no longer supported) but really Windows should have 2GB of memory to run basic functions properly.