If in my shoes: ReadyNas, WHS, Unraid, W7?

[Tomahawk51]

Just wondering if anyone would be interested in giving me an opinion. I'm considering some changes to my "environment".

Now:
-Headless Vista Machine running SageTV. Serving no other major function (I guess Crashplan is running on it). Use a Macbook for all real computing.
---Vista
---Core2Duo wimpy model, e4400?
---Sage Recordings (1x750gb, 1x400gb), System 1x120gb

-ReadyNas NV (1.2TB total via 4x400gb) and running lowish on space
---Media and Backups

My thoughts:
-ReadyNas doesn't support mixed drives, so to bump it up I'd have to remove the existing 400gb drives.
-Would WHS be *better* since the machine doesn't do much other than Sage?
-Should I get rid of ReadyNAS and use WHS, even though it is less efficient with storage?
-Is Unraid & WHS under ESXi something I want to get involved in (seems like too much admin/expertise)?

Current leanings:
-upgrade my ReadyNAS with 4x2tb drives for 6tb storage.
-try to squeeze a 400gb drive or 2 into current server for SageTV Recordings
-reformat machine as windows 7? Forget WHs?

or

-move to WHS (Vail) entirely, sell of ReadyNAS, and run 1 box

Any one want to help this indecisive soul with an opinion?

[SWKerr]

WHS is fine and a monkey could set it up. Dumped my WHS in favor of Win7-64. Don't miss it. I did not use duplication as it was a waste of disk space and unless you want to backup your client PCs over the network I can't see the value over regular Windows. I think the only thing that makes WHS more stable is that people don't try to do a lot with it. If you treated a regular PC that way it would probably be just as stable.

How big is your case?
I would go to Win7 and add a cheap RAID card if you don't have it built in. Just add disk as necessary. Not sure why if you are going to have a PC on all the time for Sage why you would also want the NAS. You cold always use the NAS as backup disk.

[Oats]

I would try to get it all on one machine. If you want raid5 get a decent hardware controller like a Perc 5i/6i. You can start out with just 3 HDDs, then add more later on when you need more space.

I would rather run XP, but Vista is fine. 7 works too if you already have a key but I wouldn't purchase one just for this when you have Vista.

WHS would be good as well but it is limited by not being able to be backed up. Vail fixes that but I wouldn't want to run a beta OS on a Sage server. Especially since when it is released your pool might have to be rebuilt from scratch. That is if you are going to use the pool.

[PiX64]

Do you want to record to these drives? or use them for media storage? couldn't tell by your post exactly.

check this post out

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...773#post452773

and

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...770#post452770

~Pix64

[Polypro]

WHS

Actual server OS, Network Backups are transparent (has saved me twice), Drives can be added to the pool or left separate (all media but TV is in the pool, I have a separate 1TB drive for shows), Duplication (at $40 per Terabyte, I don't care about efficiency), Mature product, Huge user base, forums, Add-Ins, etc..., Easy to set up, Just chugs along... I just re-built mine, a pretty top of the line AMD x4 based box...for ~$500

I've never used anything else, so I'm bias (and not knowledgeable about the others)...but it works.

P