Aidan Gauland wrote: > No, I was serious, but I do have limits. I've looked at FreeNAS, but I > would much rather use Debian, partially for familiarity, and party > because this will be a multi-purpose server, not just a NAS.
but you originally mentioned explicitly it was for NAS - this is misleading. I tried first with one dual core CPU low end motherboard with 4 SATA ports, 4GB RAM and 100Mbit connection at home - also multipurpose - didn't work well. Now I have 4CPU with 32GB RAM and 2 LSI SAS controllers and 1Gbit network. Now it works! I have 3 PCs and a popcorn. If all work together and I also compile something, you feel it from time to time. What I want to say is that these low power CPUs have their limits and might be also not sufficient for multipurpose - well depends on the "multi" Also consider NAS disks like the WD Red series. I stick to the 2TB (WDC WD20EFRX-68) cause the 3 and 4TB fail more often according reports. With those I never had issues in the past 5-6y and they are significantly more performant especially when reading. I had few Seagate that died and I have also 1TB WDC WD10EACS-00 Green, they are may be 8y old and survived, but have worse performance. The SSDs are rather expensive or better were, but they also tend to totally fail If you go for the arm based solution you should consider the board also and look into the details - latency, cache, memory access speed and the bus to the drives - which is exactly the problem if you do not get a proper controller. In this context the FreeNAS makes a lot of sense, because it is optimized. The configuration I described above consumes 80W when idle. Each virtual box I starts adds about 10%. A NAS only solution would be very power efficient compared to this.
