Unraid, freeNAS

[Rob]

Kirk Reiser <kirk at reisers.ca> wrote:
> I think you might want to give us more information on exactly what you
wish to accomplish. How much storage do you need/want? What types of
devices need/want access to the storage. I could think of other
questions but that should make my point.

At present I have about 20 tb of bare hard disk. The idea is to consolidate it all in one central location, grouped into an array of some type, be it zfs, lvm/raid, or something else. It can then be accessed by any computer/device on my network, like my phone/tablet, my laptops and my regular desktop computers.
I want the storage array to be dynamically expandable without having to rebuild everything, which i understand something like Unraid can do. I found out last night that zfs won't let you dynamically expand a raid array without replacing every drive in the pool, so that went out as an option. The hard disks are going to be in esata 4 to 8 bay enclosures.