Best operating system for my needs.

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Hi, I recently purchased a cheap Dell Poweredge sc1430 from Gumtree with the view of setting it up as a home server. Ideally what I'd like to use it as is a central location to store my Music to then be accessed by my Windows PC and MacBook. I'd also like to use it to store some files from both my Mac and PC, at some point I'd like to stream films from it to my PS3 or Apple Tv but currently I'm using powerline adapters which aren't the quickest and transfer speeds are very slow but this is something I'll sort out later.

I've got it running Ubuntu desktop at the moment just to see what I can do with it. I'm not sure if I should stick with Linux or change to a different operating system which suits my needs better. I've looked into Windows Home Server and Freenas but I'm not really sure which will be the best for my needs.

Another thing I've considered but I'm not very knowledgeable about is running Windows of some description as the base operating system and then setting up various virtual machines to provide the different services I want.

tl;dr What is the best solution for a fairly inexperienced user to set up a server to store Mac & PC files and stream media from.
 
Will you use iTunes? If so under OS X it performs poorly from anything AFP shares unless you store a disk image on them. So that means Netatalk on Linux/BSD/Solaris if you don't want to duplicate your library.

Before you start consider power costs. Servers like this are very power-hungry as well as loud and hot so they really aren't ideal for the home user. We're talking 10x the power of a Microserver say. Used servers are rarely a good buy on the whole.
 
I do use iTunes as my media player yes, I was considering buying some form of NAS device or microserver but this one popped up on Gumtree and was only £45. Noise isn't really an issue as I have it set up in my garage ontop of a fridge, you say very power hungry, powers isn't really an issue either. In the fullness of time when funds allow I'd like to buy a proper microsever as it they seem much more appropriate for my needs.
 
Take at look at NAS4FREE, does everything you are asking for. All configured from a webbrowser. Very easy to install, I've been using it for a couple of years now. Keep trying other solutions but always come back to NAS4FREE.

uPNP (DNLA), ie. smart tv's, PS3 etc
Samba, Microsoft network shares
NFS
iSCSI
Webserver
iTunes server
and more

There are many YouTube videos on how to set it up and forums if you have problems.
 
NAS4FREE also supports ZFS files system, when combined with a SSD as a disk cache and additional system memory the disk performance rocks.

Possibly over kill for your requirements, but as NFS/iSCSI NAS server for an ESX server farm it does the job. Perhaps not good enough for a production environment, but as development system it rocks.

I have, 4Gbytes of RAM, 120GByte SSD and 3 * 1TBytes (RAIDed). 4 * 1 GBit NICs to support iSCSI and NFS network traffic.
 
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