I have been running TrueNAs/FreeNAS for 15 years or so, it’s solid, and does its thing. There are a lot of guides out there for it, it’s a real storage solution and can interact with Linux devices easily through NFS. I would rather use that than Windows for this purpose. It also has a bunch of tools for drive SMART reporting and drive testing.

I personally prefer windows reFS and storage pools for my files shares. There are downsides here though. 1. ReFS is a software raid layer and is slower than hardware raid solutions. 2 ReFS is closed source so there’s not an ability for a community to audit the code. 3. It requires windows and the associated license.

Perks, with ReFS 1. Each disk in a storage pool is portable to any windows 7 or newer system. For example, if you take 2 of your 5 disks from the array on my windows server and plug them into my windows 10 gaming machine, the windows 10 box will recognize them, that they are part of an array, and tell you how many more disks from that array you need to plug in before you can recover all data. It also told me what % of data was available from just these 2 disks.

That ability right there is why I prefer the software pool on Windows. I lost my drive back plane on my home lab server. I thought the lightning strike toasted the drives, but when I did the sanity check to see if they spun up and could be mounted windows just started showing data i could access and what more I needed to plug in to make everything show up. It’s an unholy smash-up of jbod and raid and I love it. I’m sure there’s Linux version of this, but ebay has real server os keys for cheap and honestly it just works and well so i keep using it.

Other perks are it’s windows, most things know what to do with smb and there’s lots of software out there that runs on windows.

So you’ve gotten a lot of comments here and they’re very good. They certainly give you options. Now I’m going to probably go the other way because running network attached storage from Windows has never been a great solution over the years in my experience. And I’ll also temper this with if you want the chance with this new server to learn and use other platforms you certainly have the ability with that processor.

So my normal suggestion, is to load Proxmox as a hypervisor. This allows you to run LXC containers directly and virtual machines. I would run TrueNAS Scale in a VM and give it direct access to the two 10TB volumes it needs to create your RAID1 NAS in ZFS. I might tend to put a second 256GB NVMe drive to run my VMs on. The nice thing with your setup here is you’d still have two SATA ports available for more drives in the future. The bad thing of course is if you create a RAID1 array now with two drives you’re not going to be able to expand it in the future as anything but a RAID1 array. Which won’t be what you want. Maybe food for thought.

This setup gives you the ability to learn Proxmox and to learn TrueNAS in baby steps. One thing that intrigued me about this system is that you could put four more NVMe drives and run them as a ZFS RAID5 or 6. That is a pretty sweet motherboard! Especially for being so small.

You’ve got both 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps USB channels so you could use that for an external drive for your backup. As it was already mentioned, RAID is not a backup ™ and you’ll probably want to back up your important data so you don’t have to number one lose it or number two reload it all from the internet.

With a setup I’ve mentioned you can easily run multiple VMs so you could run let’s say a Debian 12 VM and have it run Docker containers and there you have your Plex and or Jellyfin and dozens of other Dockers and you’re all happy. And yes, with Proxmox you could run those same containers as LXC. For a long time I guess I didn’t realize or understand about lxc containers and so I ignored them and through the growth of proxmox in my basement-- yes it’s like a plague I’ve got 14 systems running it now–I really do like LXC. While I really like TrueNAS Scale and have four instances of it running, I do not like running containers on it because I see it as a NAS operating system and not great at running containers. That’s completely my prejudice.

I’m sure we’ll have other people chiming in about using unRAID, Open Media Vault, and things like that but while they’re certainly options, I have always found TrueNAS to be a better NAS.

It depends on your use case, if the idea is simply to get the shared storage, the windows option should work there.

I would avoid Storage Spaces since it is too unreliable, especially the parity option. As alternative to it you might use stablebit drivepool with snapraid or collect the drives into software raid inside of linux vm. Shouldn’t be an issue with Starwinds cvm https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/file-share-with-starwind-vsan