Salty Coffee

You're not wrong. But to use the esata ports on the mother board externally, I'd have to mod the case, and I'm not up for that lol Performance w 5 disks hasn't been bad over usb. It's worked till now. And I suppose I'll keep my mind open to the custom thing. I just want to keep the footprint small. So no one here uses QNAP or synology or anything like that even as a jbod? Maybe its overkill?

I would run UnRaid on the Lenovo and host the drives in a pre-built enclosure. As a DAS I guess. I'll definitely check out those videos.

I'm still in research mode, but basically looking at an UnRaid build as the best flex option after a catastrophic Storage Spaces failure. Luckily my data is backed up (it's my Plex library, 8TB w 2TB parity). But SS is dead to me now. Was a good 3 year run with no issues, but failed at the buzzer. I would like to build off of the hardware I'm currently using, if possible, which is a Lenovo m92p slim desktop deal. It has a 3Ghz intel (64bit) with 2GB ram. I kind of want to step up my game a bit (not as hard core as most of you guys tho!) by tidying up my drive situation. With the sidebar that I'm just a movie nut, not really a gear fanatic. I have a bunch of loose 2TB USB drives and want to buy a proper enclosure for them that will work with my current computer and UnRaid. Something that's stood out to me here is that everyone is using custom built set ups, rather than some JBOD enclosure prefab. Is there a compatibility issue? Or is it a philosophical choice? I'd prefer to just buy something that works out of the box if UnRaid supports that. Thanks for any guidance you can give, and sorry for being a noob.