Salutations all, I have been expanding my intrist in this Data hording quest and am looking to become a little more serious with my setup, and I have a few questions.

My inital thought is to build a michine from scratch, I have a moderate level of knowlage when it comes to the hardware of building a pc, but I have questions about software. I thought about running something like FreeNas but I'm open to suggestions. My goal would be to host my ever growing collection of Blu-rays, TV shows, Music. I would also like to have the server to handle downloaing torrents, it would also be nice if there was some way for the sever to automate the ripping of blu-rays and dvds. It would also be nice if the system could be set up to handle time machine and windows backups.

I am considering setting up the raid using ZFS, however I have seen some people mention that there are some downsides, can you guys point me in the right direction for a software raid that would allow for expandability and growth without compromising redundancy?

I am also looking to start messing around with asterisk and would like for the system to run that in some way so i dont have to have multiple machines running, I might just try VM however I have never useded or set it up on a system so that would be new territory for me.

Your advice and guidens is much appreciated.