I am building / thinking of building a media server / NAS-type PC and there are a few things I was hoping to get a little more insight into.
First off, this machine will be connected to my only TV and it will play its media on there as well as stream to my mobile devices. It will also be managing my movie and series collection.
This collection should be going onto 6x 4TB WD Red drives that are also going to be part of the build. The two things I'm struggling with are both the OS and the RAID type / controller.
Would it be wise to put all those HDD's in a RAID on the motherboard controller? (Intel Rapid Storage, Z97E-ITX/AC) and what RAID type would be most reliable? I was leaning towards 5 but after some reading, it seems a better option to go RAID 10. However I'd like some more pro's and cons. What if a drive fails? What if the motherboard fails? etc.
Then the OS. The applications I'm planning to run are:
- Sick Beard
- Couch Potato
- XBMC
- Teamviewer
So with that in mind, I was just thinking of making it a Windows 8 since I can get relatively cheap licences thanks to my current occupation. However, how would that translate in having the drives test for S.M.A.R.T. errors and such? I wouldn't mind doing it manually every day, I have time to do that. I just need to know if it's possible to have the drives tested individually whilst in the RAID I would decide to go with.
Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.