New server - RAID options
#1
Planning on rebuilding my storage server soon, and I'm exploring a couple different options. Currently I'm just running XP with shared drives, with all of the inherent limitations that presents. I'm most familiar with Windows so I'd prefer to stick with it, though I do have limited Linux experience

My requirements:
- Obvious one - share media with all of my XBMC clients
- Ability to run SageTV, Plex Media Server, Sabnzbd/Sickbeard/CouchPotato, and Subsonic
- Drive pooling/RAID/some sort of redundancy or backup
- Ability to have just a couple of root shares (\\server\movies, etc) with data pooled across drives so that I don't have to keep moving files around as drives fill up

Options:
- Install Unraid on current server
- Windows 7 with Unraid running in a virtual machine
- Windows 7 with Flexraid
- Windows 7 on current server, build 2nd lightweight low power box to run Unraid
- Ubuntu Server

Leaning towards Win7 with Unraid VM or Flexraid, questions I have to help decide:
- Is Flexraid reliable and ready for primetime? I'd hate to go that route and have problems and have to start over and/or lose data
- If I go Unraid only, will all those programs run on Unraid without being too difficult to get setup?
- How reliably does Unraid run in a VM? Seems like I could get the best of both worlds if I went that route, familiarity of base OS, Unraid in VM to handle all storage
- Would Ubuntu Server do what I need with a simpler setup if I just suck it up and improve my Linux knowledge?

Thanks for any assistance anyone can offer

ETA: my hardware in case it matters, Gigabyte LGA775 mobo with Q9550 quad-core, 2GB RAM (4GB on order), Rosewill external eSATA enclosure, bunch of drives of various size
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#2
I'm finally got everything backed up and ready to move from Windows to Ubuntu server and will probably be installing tommorow. I'll let you know how it goes, what I'm planning to do is RAID5 in LVM. Apparently it supports drive expansion pretty well which is an important feature for me.
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#3
Updating this in case it might help others. I ended up going with Windows 7 and Flexraid. Win7 is not a true server OS, but it is familiar and easy to use. Flexraid has been perfect so far, really easy to setup, can add drives of any size, very reliable. There is the occasional lag when accessing a file/folder as drives spin up, but that was expected. I really like that it is completely transparent to the OS and just creates one big drive out of everything. File sharing in Win7 can occasionally be a bit of a pain, but once it is setup it pretty much just works.
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