Essentials or FreeNas that is the question...

I currently have a EX490 but i've ran out of room and worry about using USB extensions as I will be streaming Blu-Rays and don't fancy it lagging to hell.

I plan on creating a new Ivy-Bridge server but I'm unsure what software to use, I've been reading up a lot and it seems to me like WS2012 is good but only if you have the 300 pounds Essentials and even then the Storage Spaces can be a pain in the tits... I have been reading up about FreeNas which seems like a viable solution to the problem but i'd like some other peoples opinions.

I'm mainly after something which isn't too intense when it comes to knowledge side of setting up ect, I want something as simple to use as WHS v1 tbh but where I can have storage drives over 2TB and more than 3gb of Ram.

Any opinions on the matter?

Thanks

Both systems have been discussed in various topics on this site, search will likely be your best way to learn more. Hopefully others will chime in if they have opinions for you.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Are there any advantages to being able to run Windows software on your server?

If the answer is no then go with FreeNAS or OpenFiler or any other freely available appliance based NOS that's out there. No need to pay for Windows if you don't need it.

Having said that, SBS Essentials - like other SBS editions - isn't that much harder than WHS to install. If you don't want the domain, DNS etc. you can pretty much ignore it. You can skip domain join when you install the connector:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 8d030a7c13

I dunno - for me I'm going to run WHS 2011 into the ground and then in a couple of years see where I want to go from here. It's working great, fairly modern, and will receive security updates for some time to come.

After reading reviews and people's experiences with Storage Spaces, I'll stick with DriveBender. StorageSpaces was the only thing that had me interested in Server 2012 for my WHS. I run my HomeSeer home automation software on my homes server, along with my main iTunes library so Linux/BSD won't work for me there. My biggest complaint with windows server in general is the Mac support really sucks - FreeNAS runs in a VM pretty well, though. A complete hack and extra layer of complexity but there you are. I wish someone (Thursby?) would make a modern Apple File Protocol (AFP) stack for Windows. Hmm... perhaps time to google some more again?