Hi Pacman.
There are no evaluation versions, you just have this forum to read the excellent image users have about NL
If you could explain more what you need to do, I'm sure people would give you their opinion on the specific usage.
I can tell you that NL is very fast, very stable, needs little resources, runs on older machines and costs near to nothing. OTOH, Win Server is just all the opposite but has better user limitation possibilities (data under NL is accessible to all and NL does not have user rights).
If you do not need user rights, NL does almost everything.
As for your RAID, it has to be a
HARDWARE RAID and a RAID card compatible with NL. See the compatibility list on this forum. Software RAID disks will be seen as individual drives under NL.
GA and tell us what you want to do exactly.
Regards.