First time NAS server

[milito1990]

Hi to all, the company where I work is in the process of upgrading its servers, and so I could obtain some good enterprise level hardware without paying too much for it (especially given the current ram shortage) - I was thinking of creating a home nas/server and finally centralize all media files that my family has disseminated over multiple pcs and external hdds. 

But, before embarking on the ordeal, I have some very basic questions; I've read some articles and forums on the topic, and I was thinking of setting up Freenas on the machine, with raidz2 or raidz3 depending on how many drives I manage to obtain (with the server I can get some pristine spare hdds), and use plex to stream the files to my family's pcs. If I were to plug the server in an old tv that i have around, can I play movies directly from it, or do I need some kind of hardware/vm?  In choosing hdds, is it better to get less but bigger, or more but smaller (imho is the latter, but I'd like some confirmation)? And, the 1gb of ram per 1tb of storage rule is a requirement of just a rule of thumb for maximum performance (ie, for 10x3tb drives, given the 8gb base for freenas, 32gb of ram are enough?)

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can't play directly off the server, you need a client to play the media from. 

 

With many servers you don't want to use freenas/zfs due to hardware raid. Something like openmedia vault would work much better here.

 

The 1gb/tb is bs. The ram is used as a read cache and much less can be used just fine. You can have 50tb of drives on 8gb of ram just fine.

[ProjectBox153]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The 1gb/tb is bs. The ram is used as a read cache and much less can be used just fine. You can have 50tb of drives on 8gb of ram just fine.

Can't agree more. I used 3+TB of storage on 2GB of RAM for a while.