Home Server Build

I have a media server / torrent download server at home and I need to upgrade and setup it better than it is now. My current setup is:

Lenovo TS140 model 70A4001LUX (Lux means light in latin, I like it)
1 x Intel® E3-1225v3 processor 3.2 GHz, 4C, 8M Cache, 4.00 GT/s, 84W
4 GB (1 x 4 GB PC3-12800E 1600MHz DDR3 ECC-UDIMM)
Additional 8 GB (1 x 8 GB PC3-12800E 1600MHz DDR3 ECC-UDIMM) for a total of 12 Go
RAID Controller (included): Software RAID (0,1,5,10) w/o possibility to add a supported RAID controller card
It comes empty with 4 SATA 3.0 to add drives. My choice was 2x3Tb WD Red in RAID 1 and 2 old single 500 Gb I previously had in a PC.
Windows server 2008 R2


His vocation will still to be my media server with remote access app, Torrent download/upload, NAS, virtualization, server LAB (I’m doing a lot of certifications this time) and I’m looking to build a game server to play UO (Ultima online) and maybe build my private cloud when my aptitudes will be sufficient to do so.


First thing first, I am looking to upgrade my storage capacity by replacing one or both 500Gb HDD with 3Tb Red ones.

I have backed up my files on an external disk and now I’m stuck between all researches I’ve made about how to maximize the investment for my needs.



RAID Level
Redundancy
Disk Drive
Usage
Read Performance
Write Performance
Built-in Hot-Spare
Minimum
Disk Drives
RAID 0
No
100%
www
www
No
2
RAID 1
Yes
50%
ww
ww
No
2
RAID10
Yes
50%
ww
ww
No
4
RAID 5
Yes
67 - 94%
www
w
No
3
source: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19691-01/820-1847-20/appendixf.html#50515995_98008


About RAID 10, I’ve read that it has great read/write performances but it takes 50% storage away in mirroring. It seems more data-secure and will perform well in case of degradation and rebuilding isn’t as fastidious as RAID 5. Since I need more and more storage, I fear to reach the peak too quickly.

For the RAID 5, I was thinking about building it with 3x3Tb Red drives. In RAID 5, read performances are well better than RAID 10 when write ones is far less performant.

If I add a fourth of the same drives later, will I have to entirely rebuild the RAID? If yes, I’ll put it on right now.

The second interrogation I need to confirm is the performance difference on 3 and 4 drives RAID 5: will both the read/write performance will be impacted a lot on a 4 drives vs a 3 drive?

Is write performances with 4 drives RAID 5 will catch up with the RAID 10?

Should I fear URE (unrecoverable read error)? Some old forum posts dating of 2009-11 stating that RAID 5 isn’t this reliable on high capacity disks because of that. It’s not because I’ll have sensible data on those disks but I need a minimum security, that’s why I don’t just go with JBOD.

I am looking to virtualize my OS’es and use FreeNAS or OpenFiler and I don’t want to store my data on virtual disks.

Can I use passthrough with my only one software RAID controller or it needs PCI one?

Should I install my hypervisor on a partitioned RAID or should I add a PCIe SSD for it since I’ve used all SATA available on-board?



Secondly I was wondering about how to setup my OS. TS140 is not compatible with VMWare so I was thinking about Hyper-V server 2012.

The OS/Sessions I wanted to run are:

HyperVisor
Hyper-V server 2012 free edition, Bare-Metal (since VMWare isn’t supported on my TS140)


Virtualized sessions:
Windows Server 2008 Std R2,
Windows 7 of my old laptop to run torrent server and Subsonic (multimedia server),
Ubuntu/Debian for learning,
CentOS,
Win 8.1 Pro,
Chromium,
And so on

Softwares/Apps used

OpenFiler (since FreeNAS doesn’t seem working well on Hyper-V)
Subsonic to share media to my android app and web browser at the office

Do I use the right OS'es for the right usage, should I use other app/software?