(2013-08-27, 19:04)CronosTitan Wrote: Linux seems to have a lot of distributions. Hard to decide for a novice.
Debian[0] or CentOS[1] would be my choices, mostly as they both have sane package managers, are well established, and have huge community support channels.
If you just want something that works, maybe an all-in-one software solution like FreeNAS would be the answer.
These 6 drives you have, how much space are you looking to get out of them? Also, what are you wanting to achive with them, read/write speeds, redundancy, capacity, etc, etc. Your answer will ultimately determine your ideal RAID level, and the more accurately you can answer these question, the better suited others will be to assist.
Personally, I'd go with something like Debian RAID10 with MySQL media sharing thing[3] (with a remote backup).
[0]
http://www.debian.org
[1]
http://www.centos.org
[2]
http://www.freenas.org
[3]
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW...sing_MySQL
p.s.
Rereading your first post ... do these 6 drives already have data on them? If that's the case RAIDing is not an option, without shuffling a lot of data around, as building a RAID on them will wipe the data. Alternatively then, I'd get an SSD with Debian on it, and mount each drive appropriately, and then do the MySQL library sharing to export the data .. and make sure all your network is gigabit compatible