So I was able to get my hands on my first server a Dell Poweredge r730,

Dual 750W power supplies

Dual Xeon E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz

64GB ECC DDR4 run @ 2133Mhz

Lsi MegaRaid 9361-8i 2gb

8 Bay 3.5

4x 8T HGST 12.0Gb/s 7200 RPM HDD (used) low hours under 200hrs in smart data

My plan is to use it for a home NAS (family photos, old VHS tape conversions) with access from phones and other computers, not on my home network. Then also run a few docker containers or VMs for Home Assistant, Plex Server, and anything else I can tinker with(new IT student in cybersecurity).

I am running into a problem with the LSI Controller. First I tried just running Linux Ubuntu Server, thinking less running would be better with running everything in docker containers through partianer. But I had a problem with network configs through the docker containers and also the allocation of the disk array, (I set it as a RAID 5 array). I got frustrated and started over.

Used Ubuntu Desktop and tried to do the same thing with docker containers and still had the same problems. Again got frustrated with it and then tried True Nas Scale thinking it had everything that I was looking for. Now running into a problem with the LSI controller, I know True NAS does not play well with raid controllers. But that controller is all that I have and don’t feel like spending more on something if I can get this to work. Was thinking about flashing to IT or something like that. I am just not sure how to move forward. Hopefully, I gave all the pertinent information.