Some major updates:
Many thanks to @DZMM for helping me with rclone. Rclone has allowed me to move most of my content up to the cloud, run parity less (better speed) and reduce my local storage needs (got rid of the 8TB Archive and 6TB Black - may get rid of the 8TB Iron Wolf in the future - my array now only serves as local backup and offline storage for some short-term content in case the Internet is down.).
Plex works perfectly fine with cloud storage, even on my old 150/150 connection. Nobody in the household noticed my move to the cloud. It was that transparent. I won't tell anyone and see how long it takes for someone to notice.
My upgrade to 1Gb/1Gb is more of a quality of life addition since I can do my offsite backup to the cloud more quickly. Will get rid of Crashplan as my offsite backup service. While they were great in the past, their recent move to business-only has exposed their shortcomings vs other business-level solutions. Speed and ease of restoration are the 2 biggest sore thumbs.
My workstation VM is "upgraded" from i440fx to Q35. I'm delighted to announce, the GPU fans no longer stop while idling without MSI Afterburner! That means my PM983 can idle under 45 degrees regularly. I think once Unraid moves on to a more recent qemu, the default Win10 template should use Q35, which has better support for PCIe. At the moment, I have to manually add the codes below to the xml; otherwise, my PCIe runs at x1.
<qemu:commandline>
<qemu:arg value='-global'/>
<qemu:arg value='pcie-root-port.speed=8'/>
<qemu:arg value='-global'/>
<qemu:arg value='pcie-root-port.width=16'/>
</qemu:commandline>
The latest Linux kernel + F12 BIOS seem to make disabling Global C State Control less stable. For extremely strange reasons, that manifests as out of memory errors if I try to reserve more than 50% of RAM all at once (e.g. start my workstation VM). So if you disabled Global C State Control in the past and now seem to have some instability, maybe try enabling that with the latest BIOS.