UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Well my old server just die few days ago was running Debian on it . I just bought a new system, dual core amd, 4gb of ram, blah blah.
So this server will be running as a file server, multimedia server, web server. This is a home server.
I have about 800gb of data..
HD setup:
I have 1 x 80gb where i will install my OS
I have 3 x 500gb that ill will set up in raidz
I have 1 x 1.5tb that i will use to back up my raiz
So my question is.. Which os should i run on this server.. OpenSolaris or FreeBSD Thanks

Why not Debian 5 ...!?

wanted to try something else than debian

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I haven't had much luck with either, honestly. And this question may be a religious war waiting to happen. :P

OpenSolaris if you want to use ZFS, it's where the development is done and you're more likely to get the support and fixes. To make things easier I would suggest you take the "stable" 2009.06 version and add the contrib repository.

Personally I wouldn't have thought either was an obvious choice for a machine where the roles include multimedia. Solaris & OpenSolaris a fair bit weaker than others for multimedia ( I am a full time Solaris & OpenSolaris user ) and I haven't really had much luck with FreeBSD for that role either.

How about going half way and using Nextenta or Benelix or one of the other OpenSolaris distributions that have the features that can't go into OpenSolaris directly for various reasons?