I am setting up a home server and I'm looking for some opinions on what OS to use. The server will hold my large media collection which it will stream to various devices on the network, be a central file store and I would like it to also perform backups of my desktop and household laptops. At the moment my media has just been stored on my desktop so its spread across HDD's of various makes and size. Ideally the server OS will support something like MS home servers drive pooling so I can reuse my existing hard drives. I also own a NAS with two mirrored drives which I use to keep a copy of important files so the server will also have to be able to right to the NAS once a week. Redundancy of my films, music and TV is not important as they are all rips from originals I own so I can re-rip them if I have a disaster. MS Home Server looked like the obvious choice but with the removal of drive pooling in the new release its now been eliminated as an option. I came across Amahi in my searches which does drive pooling via Greyhole so I can tell it to keep copies of selected files on the different hard drives in the pool to protect against drive failure. Amahi also supports DLNA, iTunes server and Squeeze Server which covers all my media needs. Amahi looks like it could be perfect but I have not heard of it before so if anyone here has any experience of using it I would be very interested in your opinions.? If you have other suggestions of a home server OS I would be like to hear those too! Thanks, DRB
Microsoft Dreamspark will provide you with a free copy of Server 2008 r2? https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/product.aspx?productid=17 but you need to have a child/you to be in full time education!
I also use Server 2008 R2, but it's a copy I got off TechNet. I used the drive pooling thing in the Home Server beta, but have now switched to a hardware RAID system.
But they enabled software RAID as a replacement. Drive pooling was a waste of space anyway. I much prefer using RAID for protection against failing disks and the full image backup feature for proper backups
I'll just stick my head above the parapet and give a shout out for unRAID. While it doesn't come with out of the box support for DLNA or the others, there are user-supported add-ons for them all. I use mine for movie & music rips, as well as keeping nightly backups of important data.
Thanks for the options. MS Server 2008 is maybe a bit hard core for what i'm wanting. I had looked at a unRAID server to buy a while ago and it looks like it could fit my needs quite well so I will investigate further. Thanks all!
