Disclaimer: I know enough about the topic that i realize I don't really know anything. So if one of the questions is stupid, please help me understand why.
I'm currently using OMV with 5*3TB WD Reds in a Raid 5 (12TB usable).
However I have had several problems with OMV over the years and want to switch to a more user friendly, reliable and easily maintainable solution.
The biggest issue with my OMV install is that I don't feel comfortable upgrading to newer versions since that requires a wipe of the boot drive and I don't want to risk any of the data on the array. Because of that, it's still running on 2.2 (based on Debian 7) which hasn't seen security updates in years.
Goals/Reasoning:
One of my main goals is to never having to radically change the OS through any hardware changes like adding drives or upgrading the CPU. There's a lot of photos with sentimental value and I like knowing that there's a system that always knows where to find the data.
The other goals are to use a mix of consumer and server hardware and to upgrade the storage as it is needed, prefferably one drive at a time.
The reason I'm looking at UnRaid for this is because it's supposedly one of the most user friendly solutions and you can add and replace drives 'on the go' with little to no trouble.
Also it supports dockers which I would exclusively use to add functionality (plex, openvpn etc.) to keep the OS itself clutter free and performant.
Questions:
1. Can UnRaid be upgraded, not just from release to release but also in the future from v6 to v7 with the click of a button or preferrably automatically?
2. Does it make sense to spend extra on a SLC USB stick if the goal is to keep the same install?
3. According to the How-To on replacing a drive you can't hot swap drives, is that simply impossible or could it be a future feature?
4. Is there or will there be support for StoreMI for better and easier SSD 'caching' on AMD based systems?
5. I've heard many good things about ZFS. Do you lose the ability to easily add new drives if you use the ZFS plugin for UnRaid?
6. Speaking of ZFS, does UnRaid fix corrupted data if there are 2 parity disks or is ZFS strictly needed for this functionality?
7. Is there special hardware required to conect multiple HDDs to a system running UnRaid (LSI controllers, RAID cards etc.)?