Unraid IS NOT RAID. There is no striping. Each data disk is an independent filesystem which can be read all by itself on any Linux. Each file is completely contained on a single data disk. Any drive not being currently used can be spun down.
Because of this, read speed from the parity array is at the speed of the single disk being read. Write speed is somewhat slower due to parity updates. There are 2 methods for updating parity. Each has tradeoffs. One method is faster but still not as fast as writing to a single disk.
But because each disk is independent, Unraid allows different sized disks to be used in the parity array, and allows disks to be easily added for more capacity without rebuilding the whole array.
There are several ways to use cache. The original purpose was to speed up writes since parity updates are not involved with cache, with that data moved to the parity array during scheduled idle time. The default is daily in the middle of the night, but that can be configured.
With the addition of dockers and VMs, cache is also used for better performance of dockers and VMs, allowing these to run without being impacted by the slower parity writes and also so these won't keep array disks spinning.
There can be multiple disks in the cache pool, which also provides for some redundancy with multiple btrfs raid models supported for the cache pool. Most people use SSDs for the cache pool.
There are literally hundreds of dockers and plugins available to let your server run many different applications, including torrents.
Unraid recently added VPN capability builtin with WireGuard. It will allow you to securely access your server or even your whole LAN remotely.