[flexd]

By 'something like this' I meant pretty much what you just said: Would you do it the same way (your own everything) if you needed a much smaller system, or would you go with something like FreeNAS, like you suggested? I am confident I c an get it working good either way, but I would rather not spend half my days having to tweak and worry about stuff working correctly. I understand that it will need maintenance and monitoring of course, but I would much rather be more of a end-user having a working system than being the sysadmin that has to fix it all the time. :-)

Thanks for the link, I will take a look there.

[jspiros]

Well, if you don't get a kick out of "tweaking and worrying", yes, I definitely recommend FreeNAS. Although I'm confident in my system now, it took a long time to get this way, and I could've saved hundreds of hours by just going with something like FreeNAS (had it existed); I stuck with it because I kinda enjoy doing things the hard way.

[flexd]

I do kind of get a kick out of that, but at the same time I also just want a safe system for storing data. If I end up building something like this I will take a look at FreeNAS! Thanks!