Opinions on storage system

[hotcrandel]

Hello.

I'm looking for some opinions on how I'm upgrading from my current storage system, in particular any pros and cons for operating systems.

I'm familiar with all manner of operating systems, including Ubuntu Server, Server 2008/R2
I am also comfortable with virtualization platforms, in particular Vmware ESXi [Now, ESX.]
I have not used Windows Home Server much, and very little [dabbling, really] NAS style OS like freenas or nexentia.

I'm currently using a MS Windows Server 2008 system with a small OS hard drive, and 4x1TB WD Green drives, each drive in the system as a single drive [no RAID] and tasked for different things [media, movies, music, documents].
It's a supermicro board with 2GB memory and a dual-core atom a SM SAS expander card

I back each drive up to 3x1.5TB WD Green drives in my [Win7] media server. I also have two 2TB hitachi 7200RPM drives, and 4x1TB RE3 WD 7200RPM drives sitting around that I have up on craigslist but no buyers, as well as a 2.5" 7200 RPM 500GB drive, and another 500GB 2.5" seagate momentus XT sitting around. Also two Supermicro 4x3.5" drive in 3x5.25" hot swap caddies that work.

I have bought two ASUS E35M1-I Fusion Boards, two Antec 380W Green Power Supplies, two Antec 300 Cases, and 4x4 GB DDR3 memory. I plan on recycling exisiting HDD's, so to sum it up;

2x2TB Hitachi 7200RPM
3x1.5TB WD 5400RPM
4x1.0TB WD 5400RPM
4x1.0TB WD 7200RPM Raid Edition
2 x 2.5" Laptop Drives

So, each case will have a dual core 1.6ghz AMD each with 6x SATA3 ports, 2x4GB memory, 380w power supply and gigabit ethernet, and possibly 4x hot swap bays.

What I'm looking for opinions on is

• How would you configure the HDD configuration to support file-level mirroring [probably with syncback SE or rsync, depending] between the two machines
  
• Any opinions on recommended operating system(s), I have access to MS Window Server 03, 08, MS Home Storage Server , HSS2011, and any bsd/linux distros freely distributed.

One idea is a RAID1 OS install of server 2008 on the WD RE7200RPM drives, then move each drive into one or the other machines.

I've also contemplated installing ESXi, partitioning each individual HDD to an instance of something like FreeNAS, and then doing all file transfers over iSCSI to a host server 2008 OS, as well as my desktop and or home media server.
This seems very flexible but also overly complicated, adding several extra layers and passes through the CPU stack.

 

[ripken204]

you said you are familiar with ubuntu, i would use that.
rsync is simple to use, set a cron job and run that every night if you want.