Raid or Unraid?

[Tempest]

I have been considering building a NAS, primarily so that I can pause XBMC in one room and then resume it in another. Obviously I would use it to backup important files as well. After doing some reading, it looks like UnRaid would be a cheaper alternative. It also appears to not have any drawbacks.

Opinions?

[Draco1962]

From a cost perspective overall it looks like a champ. It doesn't look to need as many HDDs as RAID5 to achieve the same or better results.

[hansolo77]

UnRAID is the way to go if you want to have reliability and easy upgradability. I went with Windows Home Server for my needs. Mostly because I needed to have a Windows Platform for the server so I could Remote Desktop into it to troubleshoot, run Windows programs (like Serviio for streaming), run uTorrent, and have decent automatic backups of my client machines. If you just want a fileserver and have no need to run other things, UnRAID seems like the best option.

[Tempest]

Thanks guys! Having you confirm my thoughts makes me feel better about my decision.

[Adultery]

Having a NAS server is great btw. Nas4Free has been good to me so far, over 4 months of uptime and not a hiccup. :-)

There's lots of stuff available here as well, including Transmission with a nice web interface, more than a few other additions and quite a few users who add things all the time, not to mention it's a portable OS if you choose to go that route.