You will hit a point when you SMB shares may drop, and other servers running open listening ports will lose connection. You would be better off using a server OS for the things you want to do.

I’m just a casual home user in a 4 person household. I’m not looking to create a nas/server for business-purposes or learn business-class networking **. I believe the connection limit in Windows is 20. I’m assuming this means max 20 concurrent connections and if this is the case, we won’t trouble it.

** Probably I put my post in the wrong sub; I didn’t entirely realise what homelabs meant when I posted (it’s just that this sub dominates the reddit search results for home nas/server so seemed a good place to post). But the responses I received have been really useful all the same. I may end up trying one of the linux-based suggestions anyway even though I still think Windows desktop would work ok for my needs.

Thanks. hadn’t heard of drivepool. I’ll look into but could you mention key reasons you use this instead of the built-in storage spaces feature?

Thanks. A few others have mentioned file system benefits of going non-Windows, although I’m not exactly clear what they are and some people mentioned something other than zfs (will need to re-read the replies to remember what). Will look into it though.