Aquatarkus1

Hi, an overview 1st. Been using my HTPC with Emby server and Emby Theatre for quite a few years now but have finally got fed up with having internal 3x 3.5 drives and 2 usb drive caddy's (a 2 bay Icy box and a 5 bay Terramaster) all a bit messy and built up and expanded over a number of years. So i have decided to build a NAS for my movie and music collections and a place for my photos documents etc that i can then access from my various tablets (android) laptop, main PC's and wife's laptop. I'm very used to building Windows PC's etc but not a Linux based NAS. For the NAS software been looking at Unraid, hence my post here So using parts left over from previous pc builds i have the following Motherboard: Gigabyte A520I-AC Mini ITX CPU: AMD Ryzen 4 4500G Memory: 32gig Kingston DDR4 NVME to 6 port SATA converter (as the MB only has 4x SATA ports) Power supply: Dagger Pro 850 watt SFX (new purchase) Case: Jonsbo N1 New purchase (takes 5 x 3.5 drives and 2.5 SSD) Hard Drives: 3x Toshiba 18TB enterprise NAS drives New purchase (what on earth has happened to hard drive and memory prices recently! lets hope the wife doesn't look at the bank statement his month) Existing hard Drives all with movies and music on them 1 x 12TB HD 3 x 8TB HD's 2 x 6TB HD's 2 x 2TB HD's (to be retired) 1 x 16TB HD used as a back up (now full) The plan is to install the 3x 18TB, the 16TB and the 12TB hard drives in the Jonsbo case along with a 512gig SSD (if the SSD is needed), have a 64gig Samsung USB flash drive as recommended in your installation guides of the Unraid software) Have the 3x 8TB and the 2x 6TB drives in the Terramaster caddy as a JBOD set if possible What i can't decide is how to configure the 3x 18TB, the 1x 16TB and the 1x 12TB Raid configurations don't appear to let you use drives of different sizes or if they do then appears the total size is limited by the size of the smallest drive hence looking at Unraid as my software choice. Have had a look at Snapraid and MergerFS as plugins but not sure if needed with Unraid as it appears to let you use the different size drives as a storage pool is that the correct terminology? So looking for a bit of advice as to what to do. Any help or suggestions gratefully received Many thanks for reading Keith W