@Dashrender
You're quite correct. I wasn't actually sure whether either of those sites were made for what I wanted; let alone that anyone would care about a simple home file server. In academia, as almost anywhere else in life, I'd say its important to listen to those who really understand what they are doing. There is so much info/tutorials out there where people just pass over their "knowledge" of what they have read somewhere, without understanding anything behind the scene/GUI. Kind of like, if I now started to give advice to others on why Raid 6 is such a good idea, how to go about it, etc.. - even though it may work for my purpose, I feel very few users outside these very particular forums have a true understanding of eventual risks, downsides and so on. For instance, aside from a very general article on, I think Cnet, that Raid5 is becoming useless, those forums are still full of people "bragging" about their raid5 setup (quite similiar in size to what I have in mind, not something really small either). Just reading over at spiceworks and some of SAM's articles/comments, I knew that wasn't an option, yet I still had no idea (and had not read anything about it) that a very simple thing such as a BIOS update would screw over fake Raid10 (which, I assumed, was very safe). I didn't even have a reason to do that bios update, I just saw a new one coming out.
Most solutions offered here, honestly, are overkill for what I want and need. But better be overwhelmed and aware of risks, then having a false sense of security.
I know you are all correct and I hate ignorance, but to be perfectly honest - and I hope you don't count that as dismissal of any advice (which it isn't), there is still a great sense of unease for me when thinking about these setups and I would much rather just go about and slap that ol' windows onto the array or even just run it from a seperate disk. I would feel much better if this was a general foray into a new OS without my storage depending on it. Because as secure as these OS' are, the risk of user error is certainly larger on my side. I know this mindset is in conflict with that of true IT guys - that lack of curiosity and exploration surely won't be understood (and, I would have the same idea in my discipline) - but at heart I'm still very content to be just a slightly advanced consumer, not an admin, if that makes any sense.
Again, I hope this doesn't create the feeling of rejecting any advice; I won't. It's just what I could do in the next half hour and know it would work, and something obviously better, yet with a lot of unknowns in it.
