just slap a CentOS on that bitch + RAID

>>51436190
Will this work with many different kinds of HDD's?

>>51436190
Stop giving advice on shit you don't understand.

Op, do not RAID dissimilar drives. It's bad form. You can use them in software defined storage which accomplishes the same thing differently. Check out greyhole. It's a JBOD system that leaves the drives independently readable should a drive in the array go tits up. It will have no problem with drives of dissimilar makes and sizes. There is no redundancy so you have to do that yourself. Usually it involves making two disk pools and setting up a scheduled rsync and tar job. The last one I built ended with 10TB of raw storage that the guy had 4tb sectioned off for redundancy. Every night it would mirror certain directories from his main disk pool to his secondary, compress the files into a few gzipped tarballs then delete the mirrored data. He was a photographer so his data would change from day to day. He also pushed his tarballs to drop box I think. It's been a while.

>>51436355
See THIS is the kind of shit I was hoping to hear. Thanks anon. Redundancy is not the highest priority for me here, but it would certainly be nice. Secondly: The motherboard is never gonna have enough SATA slots right off the bat though, thats why im going with the PCI SATA card. Will most OS's recognize drives hooked up through that okay or will I run into problems?

>>51436419
It depends on the HBA that you buy. If you get a nice one yeah. A cheap rocketraid or SIIG, maybe not. Don't underestimate the need for redundancy either. It may be manual but it's still in your best interest to have something with at least 1 day of granularity.

>>51436462
Thanks for the extra help so far anon. Finally, any OS recommendations for a first time server-setter-upper?

>>51436355
I've heard greyhole has issues with reliability. Has anon ever tried mhddfs? It's a linux virtual file system that you can use to concatenate drives so that many different drives all show up as a single virtual drive. The mhddfs filesystem does not stripe or otherwise break up the data across the drives, so if any drive fails, you will still have all the data in complete form on the drives that survived. You won't even have to rebuild the virtual FS; just pop them in a s JBOD and go from there.

Recently used mhddfs to create a low-redundancy fileserver at work when we ran out space; worked like a charm for us.

>>51436595
Quite honestly it doesn't matter. Use the one you're most comfortable with that has the lowest overhead.

>>51436662
Greyhole is just a symlink manager. The data is kept in native format so any disk can be added to another machine and all data is accessible. It's specifically for home users who want to concatenate drives of different makes and sizes.

>>51437901
My knowledge of symlinks is bad, but I'm imagining then that greyhole builds a virtual "drive" full of nothing but symlinks to files on various drives in your systems? Can that interface be seen and used by regular file managers?

And finally, I'm assuming all that I've heard about greyhole reliability issues is bunk?

>>51437901
Would I be able to add drives that I'm moving from other machines into the pool of greyhole drives later on?

>>51438352
yes, you can also do that with mhddfs as well.

>>51436158
I use FreeNAS, but I've only used identical drives with it. No idea what it does if you just throw random HDDs in