mwhitnell

Michael, thank you for the response. I have a spare i7-8700 computer (6 SATA ports) case has 8 open drive spaces, not using...my thought is to put 4 ea 14tB hard drives in, format GPT NTFS, say "W" "X" "Y" "Z". Have "Y" a clone of "W" and "Z" a clone of "X". Use "W" with folders Movies & New Movies, use "X" with folders TV Shows and New TV Shows. Kodi via SMBs for all four folders: Movies, New Movies, TV Shows, New TV Shows. Use "Y" & "Z" as backups. When I load to "New..." folder I can view these on Kodi, then once a month copy "New..." files to all drives WXYZ. I can do this from my normal using computer, since everything is on the LAN. Now I just have to figure out how to turn off "Y" and "Z" so they only spin during a backup...any suggestions? Or should I use unraid all 4 drives, plus one parity, and do what most do use Raid as a backup. Does unraid only spin up the drives that you are reading from?

I have two Qnap NAS, one with Movies one with TV Shows. They have reached the storage limit. They have never given issues for the last 5 years. I am considering a new unRaid server, have read a lot, looked at this forum with many problem issues discussed. I do like the design to use various size drives. I do like not being locked into mfgs priority hardware...Qnap, Synology, Asustor, etc. I guess I am not in favor of striping across drives, so unRaid is appealing. I wonder why someone would want to use a unRaid server for VMs perhaps you can help me know why? I do have a i7 computer GTX1070 GPU & 4K monitors (3) side by side. I do a lot of Autocad design, etc, and have a VM on my computer with Windows 7, etc...which I haven't used in a while. I do have a ethernet RJ45 in each room and a 24 1gig switch & 24 port POE for 12 cameras. So I seldom use WiFI, most all devices are Static IPs, only moveable devices are DHCP (phones). So perhaps you can enlighten why NAS rather than having a dedicated computer with 8 hard drives, 4 for useable media data, 4 for cloned backup in NTFS files and run Kodi on all my 4K TVs. Buy the way I do use Kodi with my two Qnap NAS. All my media is in MP4, MP3, JPG containers, so I dont transcode. Really looking for thoughts.