I have a spare PC, i5 7th gen, 16gb Ram and 500gb SSD with a 2TB hard drive. I fancied purposing for a storage server, all my other devices around the house are Windows, should I just pop on Windows 11 Pro, or are there any benefits to going for a flavour of Linux? I would maybe like to play around with a VM or two as well.

I also have a limitation that this needs to be wireless (for now) can I still assign a dedicated local IP addresses to the host and various VM’s? I’d also welcome some suggestion for me to dabble in or guides :-)

  • vasveritas@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Windows is okay to start. There’s nothing wrong with putting Plex on there, sharing some folders, and having a little server.

    You can get more performance and more features for running Linux though. It’s more reliable and you can get more help, because that’s the tool people use. There is a learning curve though.

    For a storage server, Linux works well as a NAS (Network Attached Storage). It supports SMB, which is the protocol Windows uses to share files. A Linux server will be able to share files with a Windows PC.