So as I look to build my first dedicated media server, I’m curious about what OS options I have which will check all the boxes. I’m interested in Unraid, and if there’s a Linux distro that works especially well I’d be willing to check that out as well. I just want to make sure that whatever I pick, I can use qbittorrent, Proton, and get the Arr suite working
I use Unraid and I’m loving it. Super stable, easy to manage, set up dockers, let’s me pool my hard drives and set up parity. Highly recommend. Only thing that I’ve had a hard time with is finding a stable flash drive - you’d be surprised how many start to fail when used 24/7
I have an overkill 128GB SanDisk flash drive I got for 13 dollars and it works great for my 24/7 unraid setup
I’ve heard smaller, older drives are actually more reliable in the long run. USB 2.0 especially because of the lower speed causes less heat
The thumb drive isn’t used all the time. I’ve been using a cheap USB drive that cost me like $12 several years ago, and haven’t had any issues yet. It’s been running constantly for the last year or two.
I had an issue recently where my usb drive was “disconnecting” which triggered unraid to give read errors and then panicking. I had checked though and it wasn’t being regularly read or written to but still caused my whole server to crash. Changing usb drive has since fixed it, for now 😄
Came here to suggest unraid as well. There are probably better options, but for a first timer, I can’t imagine a better solution. The ability to just add a hard drive to the array with virtually not configuration, as well as adding up to two parity disks is great. Caching is super easy too.
Plus they now support zfs so there’s that.
Unraid would be a very good choice for someone who is reaching out and asking this question. Debian can do the same but I suspect it’ll be easier to setup and manage on unraid.
Disk management in unraid is also great.