Which small server?

[R.C.Anderson]

I was originally looking at getting a 4-bay NAS, however when looking at the price of one compared to a small server, it seems like I would get more customizability & better performance at a lower cost.

Question is, what do I go for? I've noticed the HP Gen 8 Microserver, HP ML10 Server & Dell T20 server all have rebates on at the moment, making them ~125, 105 & 225 respectively.

From a look round the web, these all provide better performance than a NAS would (e.g. Synology 416play, which I was looking at), but at a much reduced price.

My main uses for this would be as a NAS, but acting as a Plex server & download station (I may add other things to it in the future as I tinker, but they're the main points). I'm looking at installing 4 data drives (plus a SSD boot drive), running in RAID (most likely 10)

Which device would I be best off looking at? Are there any important factors with any of them that I might have missed that would prevent me being able to use it as I wanted?

The OS I plan to use hasn't been decided yet either (as I've only really stated thinking about a server vs a NAS yesterday!), so any suggestions to look into would also be appreciated.

 

[R.C.Anderson]

That's for the input guys (and no worries pulling it off topic a little, it's actually quite interesting to see how effective VMs are (as I've had very little experience with them)).

Seems like it's best to go for either the ML10 or T20, due to the added performance, I've just got to look into the difference between the two now to see which is better out of the two.

 

[R.C.Anderson]

I've ended up ordering the T20 because of the extra performance available for Plex.

Going to need to source some more RAM though. Any pointers as to the best stuff to get?

 

[R.C.Anderson]

What about freenas? Read some good stuff about it too.