Gilgatex

Background first so you can understand my situation better, for a better recommendation. Today I mentioned in passing that I was concerned about not having a backup plan at all to someone today, and they enlightened me about raid arrays, the unraid OS, and how parity works. It was a long conversation, but I finally grasp the concept, and I've decided that I want to jump into it. I am a moderate PC gamer (I mostly play a lot of indie games with an occasional AAA game thrown in) and I am also Twitch streamer. I have a PC that I built to be near the top of the line in 2017 and it is still holding strong, but I had never given much consideration to backups. When my hard drives filled up, I just threw another hard drive in my case. The case came with 8 bays and there is still plenty of room. I figured my media and games I could re-download, my streaming files I could at least get a lower quality backup from my YouTube uploads, and personal photos and documents were already saved to Google Drive. But I'm tired of living in fear. I want a real backup solution. I am going to use Windows 10 to at least get parity set up with my current hard drives for some protection (I think it uses a form of raid 5). Although one thing that was hammered into my head is "raid is not a backup." So I would like to build a NAS using Unraid. That being said, here are my requirements (keeping in mind the Pinned Thread ) It needs to be quiet so you won't hear it when I stream. It doesn't need to be silent, but for purposes of my stream, it needs to be at least as quiet as a Nintendo GameCube. It needs to be compact. I don't have much physical space. I would like to move various media-based servers over to the new box (specifically: SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr, and Plex), so it needs to be powerful enough to run these services, and for transcoding 4k video as well as un-raring downloads, but not much more than that. I might run a LAMP install on it as well to toy with. I haven't decided yet, but you should probably account for that possibility. 1000T Ethernet a plus. I suppose I could live with 100T I have other people with other computers in my house that will want to back up their data as well. I assume that's more of a software/OS/configuration issue. I plan to run it headless to cut down on the amount of space it takes. I don't care about hot swapping. I don't care about colors or flashing lights or how it looks. My tower is solid black so I suppose solid black would be nice to match, but it's not a requirement. I don't think I need SSDs. I believe HDDs are fast enough for what I'm doing. I am planning on using four 8TB HDDs to start, including a single parity drive. Right now I have about 13TB of data that needs to be backed up, and that is not including other users in my household that might need to back their data up as well (they have about 2-3TB combined between them all). I think 24TB should last me 3-4 years at least. I think 6 bays total would probably be enough as far as expandability goes. Once I get to 6 bays full, I'll probably just want to rebuild a new box anyway. This will be a new build from nearly scratch. I'm going to swap out the 8TB from my PC and replace it with three 4TB drives so all my drives are the same size for the native Windows 10 parity solution. Then I'll ideally use this removed 8TB in the new build as the parity drive. It's a Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC. I haven't picked out any other parts. I'm not quite sure where to start as far as form factor goes. No budget figures. I'm flexible. It costs what it costs. I usually buy higher-quality hard drives for fear the cheap ones will fail, but I suppose with a separate backup system and parity on both systems I could go lower end on reliability as long as speed benchmarks are adequate for what I'm using it for (exactly what speed I'd need, I'm not entirely sure). This ended up being longer than I expected, but now you have plenty of data to work with! Thanks in advance!