So when my company was upgrading their servers i inherited one, and used it as an unraid box. A dell with 2 first gen lga 2011 xeons, 64 gig ram, and 8 3.5" hot swap trays. And loaded it up with a bunch of 3tb refurbished reds. The thing sounds like a low hair drier even when tamed, so it lives in the garage.
Years later ( was unraid 5) Things have changed. I only seem to use 7-8 TB, i dont host vm's, and just run a few dockers. My backup (repeat after me, raid is not a backup) is just robo copying the array to another set of 3-6 tb drives i keep on my desk.
So the wheels started turning ( and the server is getting long in the tooth) about building something that could live in the room with me. With my usage i could maybe stop using ECC ram, and build a little 35 watt box or something. I was also thinking of ditching the whole array, and just getting a 8-12 tb drive. I guess my main concern is their a point in running raid 1 with unraid? Im wondering if i can just have 1 8-12tb in the unraid box, and then back that up to the 8-12tb that is going to be sitting on my desk. I dont think unraid can do a parity check, that checks the whole drive, if its in raid 1 or just a drive without a parity drive.