small fileserver - advice
 

Hi, I'm going to be building a small fileserver; i.e. the size of the OS will be minimal, and the storage well, bigger.

I have 8x160GB for a raid5 array, 40GB for install a 'full' installation, and a 32/64/128MB CF card w/IDE adapter or a 128MB USB stick for the real thing. (Maybe even PXE booting it from another machine). Other hardware; Asus P4C800 w/P4 2.4, 128MB DDR-RAM, Radeon 7000, Promise Ultra 100 TX2, Intel PRO/100 and Intel PRO/1000.

So my question is, wich distro? After some reading I have three candidates, Slackware, Debian or LFS - but have no real experience with either, the last linux I used was RedHat 7.3. The criterias are, stability, stability, performance and power management, in that order.

From my reading so far I think I'll go with Debian (woody) for its stability and many examples of making it real small - but would like some comments or experience with software raid / performance / stability.

Need: serial console, ssh, nfs and samba.

Would like to power down the array when not used - ie. for home use it wont be accessed at night etc.

Debian and Slack are equally good. I usually use Debian for servers, because the packaging/update system (very impotant) is more mature. LFS is good, but you need much time to install/configure it. Plus I'd rather use its second or thinrd install as production box to make sure everything is done correctly.

I've been running a stable (x86 as opposed to ~x86) server using gentoo for over a year now. It hasn't even farted on me.

Just another choice...