Debian and the standard linux mdraid?

Unraid and Truenas are pretty popular. Openmediavault is less popular, but a pretty simple system based on Debian.

Generally, I think it is better to use a general server OS like Debian or Fedora instead of something specialized like Proxmox or Unraid. That way you can always choose the way you want to use your server instead of being channeled into running it a specific way (especially if you ever change your mind).

I run Debian with zfs. Really simple to set up and has been rock solid for it too. As far as I can tell all the issues I've had have been my fault.

ZFS looks like it uses a lot of RAM, but you can get away without it if you need too. It's basically extra caching. I was thrilled to use it as an excuse to upgrade my ram instead.

Mdadm has a little more setup then zfs, as far as I'm concerned. You need to set your own scrubbing up whereas zfs schedules it's own for you. You need to add monitoring stuff for both though.

I've considered looking into the various operating systems designsd for this, but they just don't seem to be worth the effort of switching to me.

Proxmox ZFS with plenty of ram. (ZFS is ram heavy)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 20 acronyms.

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Definitely use ZFS for the data volumes in order to avoid silent data corruption. If you don't use separate drive for the OS, then you need to look into ZFS on root.

Honestly, from your description, I'd go with Debian, likely with btrfs. Would be better if you had 3 slots so that you can swap a bad drive but, 2 will work.

If you want to get adventurous, you can see about a Fedora Atomic distro.

Previously, I've recommended Proxmox but, not sure that I still can at the moment, if they haven't fixed their kernel funkiness. Right now, I'm back to libvirt.

Bog-standard Debian with LVM. LVM can also do RAID, but you could also do mdadm below LVM if you prefer. Keep it simple.

I'm very new to the whole ordeal but to my knowledge ZFS and, less so BTRFS are a bit too rigid for my setup, I'm personally looking at Debian with mergerFS and SnapRAID.

I was in a similar boat. Initially, I ran debian with docker but later on decided to check out unraid. It's pretty easy to get setup, and you have a lot of docker containers pre-configured, so you can just click and install. I have it notify me whenever something goes on with it, but outside of that, I don't tinker much with it.

Only two weird things about it though...

1. You dont install unraid. Instead, you run it through a usb. More specifically, the usb has a specific config that'll then load everything to your memory.

2. Recently, they redid their pay structure so not too familiar with the changes but you do have to pay for unraid.

Unraid!

Of course, Gentoo with mdadm! I am running Linux software raid for the last... 20 years? And never had a single issue.

Also a big Gentoo fan, and of course use podman instead of docker :)

XigmaNAS