OS for low budget DIY NAS?

Question

Do it yourself

I have an old Atom N550 netbook with 2 GB of RAM, it works as a home NAS: Plex, Transmission, and several USB hard drives are hung on it.

Manjaro acts as a layer between hardware and softservers, but I’m not 20 years old anymore to red-eye and assemble my DSM with blackjack, and there’s no point in buying a large ready-made NAS with “everything already configured”.

What do you recommend as an operating system - with dull wallpapers (in the sense, with a GUI that even a child can handle), definitely with Plex, a gallery with a cache for heavy photos would also not hurt, well, it should feel fine on piece of iron ten years ago.

I am aware of the existence of FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, NAS4Free. Question: what to choose?

Answer 1

At the very 2 servers on FreeNAS ... In your case, it definitely will not work. FreeNAS requires drives to be connected directly through the motherboard controller or through an HBA sata adapter. And most importantly, he needs a lot of RAM, at least 8GB for normal operation, because there is only ZFS fs.
XigmaNAS (nas4free) or OpenMediaVault will work well, it probably depends more on whether you are more familiar with freebsd or linux. Put each one on a virtual machine, see what
iXsystems is still preparing TrueNAS SCALE on Debian in the box

Answer 2

XPEnology

Answer 3

Read this and this article

Answer 4

I assembled my storage on the config 2 cores, 2 gigs, sata 2. 3 disks: 2 x 1 TB mirror, 1 x 2 TB. This whole economy was managed by FreeNas. Tried other operating systems (Windows Server, XigmaNas, Nexenta) - of which FreeNas is the most humane. Everything tolerably worked normally and there was enough memory.
Later I bought a ready-made from Asus AS1004T v2.

Answer 5

In terms of convenience, OpenMediaVault is your choice. Huge opportunities and minimal appetites. Used for a long time before moving to an iron NAS