kugrash

I'm looking to build my first unraid server (or perhaps two) but I could really use some help because I think I'm getting a little overwhelmed by the options. Let me start with what I had going before I started this journey. Starting Hardware5ish years back a friend helped me get set up with a 4 bay Synology DiskStation with 4x WD Red 8TB-5400 drives. Using Synology Hybrid RAID I have 21.8TB of capacity available to me. That's still working fine, no issues there but I know that's not a backup solution and I need to get actual backups before anything goes south. I also inherited an old workstation from work some years back that's just been collecting dust. That machine is: Fractal Arc Midi Tower with 8 drive bays Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 Motherboard Intel I7-2600K @ 3.40 GHz Asus Radeon HD 6670 2 x 4GB-1333MHz Memory PC Power and Cooling Silencer 760 Watt PSU SSDs 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 500 GB Samsung 850 480 GB Inland Professional I also had some old HDDs sitting around, a 150 GB WD Raptor X and a 40 GB WD Protege, but I think those are probably better off as paperweights at this point, even if they turn out to still be functional. Beginnings of a planSo I thought I should turn that Fractal case into a new NAS. If I was to do it right I'd build a new NAS in there to be my primary, then build another one for an onsite backup, and stick my Synology in someone's house as an offsite backup. One research montage later, here's where I'm sitting: I want to use unraid for these new builds (if that wasn't obvious) The hardware in that old workstation is a bit too weak, but would probably do fine as my onsite backup hardware as it essentially only needs to be cold storage I don't need to buy current gen hardware for my primary NAS but some of the resell prices make me think I might as well buy new A Microcenter bundle might not be out of the question I want to run some containers (including plex) and maybe do some virtualization so I need to keep that in mind An Intel CPU with QuickSync seems to be the recommendation if I don't have a dedicated GPU for transcoding An HBA may or may not be necessary? Might depend on how many sata ports the motherboard has? DDR4 should be more than sufficient, and cheaper than DDR5 I could maybe use some of those SSD's for caching, but if I'm buying new hardware maybe I'd be better off with an NVMe SSD for my cache? Would it be possible to use any of those SSD's for the plex library? I should have at least one parity drive, even if it's not strictly necessary with backups I'm going to go BTRFS instead of ZFS, even though ZFS seems to be more popular I also researched some drive options, and ended up ordering 4x recertified 12TB Seagate IronWolf drives. Well, I ran into my first snag because I didn't realize they didn't have the 6 screw holes and the drive trays in this fractal case aren't full size. Other people seem to have run into this same problem, here's a picture someone posted of their sketchy solution. Where I'm at nowFirst and foremost, I want to get this primary NAS started. With this Seagate problem I'm thinking I have 3 options: Buy a different case that they'll fit securely into Would rather not because that'd leave the full size Fractal case for the onsite backup and I'm hoping to get a smaller profile case for that Find some alternate way to mount those drives in the Fractal Buy different drives that will fit securely into the Fractal and save the Seagates for the onsite backup This is my current preference As for a motherboard/CPU combo to pick up, I'm honestly kind of lost. A lot of what I've read suggested picking up some older, used hardware but some of the prices make me think that might not be as significant of a saving as I thought. For example, I could pick up an i5-12400 from Microcenter for 130 and I would have all the protections that buying new provides. Given that I want to do more than just store data, I'm leaning that route but I'm not entirely sold. So, now that I've spelled out as much of my situation as well as I can, can anyone provide some advice so I can get unstuck and continue down my unraid journey? My biggest hangups are: Am I overthinking my hardware options? Is it overkill to just grab some new (not used) hardware that's a little old? Is any of that old hardware fine for a cold storage NAS? Is it worth using those SSDs for my primary? Would they be good enough for caching? If my motherboard has enough SATA ports, is there any reason to get an HBA? Any reason I should do 2 parity drives instead of just 1? That was a lot, so if you're still here I really appreciate you taking the time to read through all of that and offering any feedback!