I've been running home servers in one form or another for some time. Win NT4 briefly, FreeBSD, Win2k server for a while, then to Linux for quite some time. I tr

I've been running home servers in one form or another for some time. Win NT4 briefly, FreeBSD, Win2k server for a while, then to Linux for quite some time. I tried FreeNAS but learned to hate the webui churn and outdated/scattered docs but liked ZFS. Went back to Linux using Mint (yeah, weird choice...) and had issues with Mint and my hardware was crap. I wanted ZFS so I decided to go back to my roots and run FreeBSD again. I realized the right way to start is with GOOD hardware. So I went on eBay (I know, I know...) and found a nice Supermicro uATX server board and a 65 watt quad core Xeon in the 1151(?) socket then bought a fresh set of Kingston 16 GB ECC DIMMs, and 4x 8TB enterprise CMR SATA disks. I read the docs and read a few how-to's from blogs and personal sites. In a day I had a everything setup, accounts, Raid-Z5 data store, samba and nfs exporting the data store. It was so damn easy. It's been running solid ever since. It's so reliable it's boring. I have to remind myself its even there so I can run updates and check on the thing to make sure its not full of dust or snakes or whatever.