My wife has decided that the dedicated machine is in the way. I want to combine unraid with my new gaming machine. I haven't put the parts for the gaming machine together yet, and won't for a few days, however if it's possible, I plan on combining the machine with unraid and using my gaming machine as a VM on top of unraid. Is it possible to physically move the existing disks to the new hardware, without losing the data? or would it be a better plan to migrate the data off using a portable hard drive a few hundred gigs at a time? I still have two TB of files that I haven't added to the NAS yet, but I have around 1.2TB of files already on the NAS, and I would hate to loose those files. Hence the use of a dedicated NAS for them.
The gaming machine will be a direct upgrade of my current machine, and there will be enough SATA ports for all the unraid disks plus my SSD for a boot drive. I haven't played with VM's on unraid at all. I'm just guessing that I will be able to give it a dedicated drive, and pass the single GPU through to the VM. Also, Do the VM's auto-start with unraid in the event that a power loss occurs? or would I be required to boot up a second machine and trigger the VM?