Looking for recomendations for my HP ProLiant N40L

[drewdatrip]

I just recently picked up an HP ProLiant N40L Microserver in replacement of my failing Synology DS210j and im currently looking for some advice.
When my DS210J was running perfectly it was running Sabnzbd and Sickbeard on it as well as serving up content tp my XBMC and OpenELEC machines. However over time i started getting SMART errors and has declined in performance so greatly i have been unable to really do anything other then just be plain NAS. Anyway the declining state of the NAS, prompted me to pick up the HP.
My OpenELEC machine now does the downloading and whatnot however im looking to setup the HP to replace the NAS in its function as a NAS but also to run SAB, SIckbeard and CouchPotato.
Im currently between FreeNAS, unRAID, WHS or FreeBSD
My current understanding is FreeNAS is a great NAS OS however the installation of additional software like SAB or SB are very difficult. unRAID seems somewhat complex, however it does have some working SAB and SB installer and it appears to be maintained and updated. WHS seems to be very simple and i have been told that you can easily install software on. However Im a little reluctant use Windows as i have been primarily Mac and Linux for the last several years using mostly NFS shares and im not sure i wanna revert back to samba, although im not sure why that sounds bad to me, but it does for some reason. Another idea is to just install Ubuntu or FreeBSD. I am familiar with Ubuntu i could install mdadm and webmin (both apps im unfamiliar with) The issue there would be the lack of ZFS support and the HP only supports raid 0 and 1 and i was hoping do do something like raid 5, while ZFS seemed like a good option and would not require buying a raid raid card but rather just more ram. The other full OS option would be FreeBSD, it supports ZFS and has packages for all the applications i want to run, however i have never used the OS at all.
Anyway any help or recommendations would be super helpful! thanks for reading my long post and ramblings

Drew

[Vorkbaard]

Hi Drew, as a rule of thumb, go with what you know best.

I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2 on the HP ProLiant N36L. I take it the N40L also has four hdd slots and one dvd drive slot. What I did was install the os on the disk that came with the machine but connected that disk to the on-board sata port. I took out the native raid controller backplate and put in a pci-x raid card and connected four disks to that in raid 5.

The machine is not the fastest one you've ever seen but it performs just fine for downloading through SABnzbd and serving media content to my media player, computers and serving a small website.

The N36L and I assume the N40L as well make great NAS machines if you customize them a bit.

Let me know if you want to know more details or if I can help in any way.