My current system is a W11 pro box with Intel 13500 & MSI PRO-Z790-P, a HPE branded 710-DA2 NIC - a 562SFP+, & 80 TB of spinning rust, which resides on 2 M.2 to SATA. I can turn the HDs of in win now, as the controllers seem to support it.
I primarily use to remote in with MS from the MacOS laptop. So as NAS, file & media server. I run EMBY, but it comes to all the big distros now. Need a torrent client too.
Low power use & HD spin down. The server resides in a G5 case in my living room with HD cages, so its with Noctua fans & Fan Control to keep them spinning as slow as possible & as silent as possible. Its always on. I use remote, to play videos on the laptop, as the old MBA struggle with anything above 720p. The Haruna player can likely replace the MPC-BE I use on wintel.
I did have the HDs in RAID1 at some point, so ZFS for some or all of the pool later could be thing.
I’m likely a superuser in Win, build my compters myself, and did grow up with a command promt in DOS, so some fiddeling is not scary.
For the day to day runnning, the box should warn me of impending failures, as most of the time its left to itself.
KDE seems interesting, but what should be beneath?
What do you use for your home-media server and what good/bad has is meant for you?
Any unknow unknows I have missed?