I’d urge anyone planning on building or buying a home server to try out Unraid. It’s not free or open source, but it’s only $130 iirc for the unlimited lifetime license and it Just Works^tm. You install it on a USB stick, and the web interface has you up and running within like 2 minutes. The only hard rule is that your parity drives must be as large as or the same size as your data drives, but other than that you’re…
Unraid is getting popular on some DIY space but I feel that it's hobby-ish product. I astonished that it won't set root password and able to login by default. Write performance is terrible (by design) and "SSD cache mechanism" is made by crappy shell script. I agree that it still worth for some use case.