Planning a Debian NAS

[Aidan Gauland]

I want to set up a file server on my home LAN with just consumer-grade 
hardware, and run Debian stable on it.  For hardware, I am probably 
going to get a refurbished mid-range tower with a four to six 3.5" SATA 
drive capacity, and put WD Reds in it.

What I'm not sure of which filesystem to use.  I could just use ext4 
with RAID5 or RAID6 to get striping with some fault tolerance (i.e. time 
to replace a failed drive without losing everything). ZFS looks easier, 
but only if you're on BSD.  btrfs sounds like ZFS for Linux, but it 
appears to still be of beta quality, and I can't tell whether it can yet 
do striping with parity.  Any advice?

Regards,
Aidan Gauland