Transforming old PC into home server - OS options?

If you’re running LTS instead of the latest Ubuntu, I think ZFS support is not included in its kernel, so if you have no intention of running a kernel different than Ubuntu LTS, even from a PPA, you’ll have to forget about ZFS, which has great advantages for a NAS in my opinion. The latest Ubuntu has ZFS support which is experimental, however… It is better to run ZFS non-root for stability also, it can be done very easily, as ZFS has excellent volume management and RAID support.

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In fact I would recommend that your root FS not be the same as your primary NAS storage. For my homebuilt I use a 250 GB M.2 NVMe as the primary OS drive for Fedora. All of the hard drives have their own btrfs filesystem.

Some NAS used to use a read-only SD or Compact Flash card which meant more resistance against malware since nothing could write to the OS drive. However, I haven’t seen that type of setup in a while, and if you’re doing your own learning and hacking that kind of setup is a real pain to manage.

Ok. That makes sense. So the concern with using ZFS as a root filesystem is not valid in this instance since I will have a separate FS (non-ZFS) on the primary OS SSD, and the NAS drives can be whatever they want… ZFS or not. Quick googling shows that ZFS support has been in Ubuntu since 15 or 16, just not as a root filesystem option. Stability and support for storage ZFS systems in Ubuntu is relatively mature?

Yeah FreeNAS does not even support root and storage on same file system.

You boot from different media (typically USB) and run storage on your disks.

It will configure the USB with ZFS as well but that is so that it can do boot environment snapshots for proper rollback. It is a different ZFS pool.

If you’re concerned about ZFS maturity, and want to “roll your own” rather than a turnkey web-admined solution, you could use FreeBSD, the same OS FreeNAS uses, instead. The only way to have more ZFS maturity than that is running Solaris, which I don’t really recommend for novices.

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Well i think that a couple of decent options have already being mentioned.

I would like to add Open Suse to the list of recommendations.
I think that Open Suse is a pretty good OS for this type of thing.
Decent support for multiple file systems etc.

Other options are already mentioned CentoS, Ubuntu Server, Debian or Freenas.

Indeed, lots of options mentioned here. I’m going to take some time and do a little more research. Once I have formulated a plan I’ll come back and get some final input.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Stay tuned.