Few years ago, I created a NAS system using my old PC. The old pc is powerful enough to do the basic NAS operation except real time transcoding of 4K or more than one 1080 streams. The setup was setup as follows: 1 SSD 128 GB for boot device 2x 4 TBs for the main storage configured as RAID 1 The hard disks were from different manufacturers (WD red plus and Segate) to avoid catastrophic situations: disks are part of a bad batch and you will have a second failed disk during the build of the RAID array. Here is a list of my mistakes: My first mistake was CentOS. I wanted a stable machine without surprises, unexpected behavior, as much less bugs affecting my setup. I had three free/open source options: Open Media Vault: Debian based Linux with many configuration options. The main downside is that you don't have support for ZFS and you have to very often use the command line to fix things. Moreover, there are a plethora of open issues/bugs that can make your life harder than exp...