I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB. Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one

I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB. Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one would rather use the 4 bays for drives in the zpool, I used the recommended method of running the OS from a USB drive. Sounded strange to me, but it's worked a treat. I saw that there are kits out there for replacing the empty CD slot in the Microserver with an SSD for the same purpose, but I'd rather not touch something that's working now. I went for RAIDZ1, despite a lot of internet protestations about it, as I basically only store movies/music/Time Machine backup there anyway. Been thinking about backup solutions for everything, but it all seems fairly expensive for what is essentially just backing up media. To people recommending Plex for media streaming, I would actually recommend Serviio over it. It took a little extra setup in a jail, requiring some extra port downloads, but it works extremely well in it's DLNA streaming to my PS3. Where it shone brighter than Plex for me was it's support for transcoding and subtitles - it transcodes and shows all of my H264 video files with ASS subtitles with all of the style intact. It also supported PGS subtitles, but my piddling processor didn't quite match up to it.