Tomc19876

Hi all, New to the forum and unraid and looking at redoing my server running this and I'm some opinions of whether what I'm thinking is going to work well. I currently have a frankensteined together old dell i7-2600 XPS system that I am using as my server for all of my movies and TV shows and running plex and want to update it properly as I've now got a 4k tv and with the movie files for that being 50+GB I'm quickly running out of space. This is 99% used for media storage and not really for other files (although if it was set up properly I would like to keep regular backups for my other PC which has a 250GB HDD). Currently I have 6x HDD's connected which are- No.1 - 120GB SSD as windows 10 boot drive No.2 - 500GB internal HDD for downloading files to before copying to other HDD's for storage No.3 - 3TB internal HDD for CCTV recordings for my VMS No.4 - 3TB internal HDD for TV Shows No.5 - 3TB external HDD for TV Shows No.6 - 4TB external HDD for Movies + just backups and other things I want to store off my normal PC My plan is to change over a few things like new case that holds more HDD's, new more efficient power supply and mainly to install a much larger HDD (10-14TB) and then add more large HDD's as fill up them up and get rid of the external HDD's and smaller HDD's. I would like to have- No.1 - 120GB SSD running unraid with a windows 10 virtual machine (reused) No.2 - 4TB internal HDD for downloading files (take this out of the external HDD one - reliability is not as important for this one) No.3 - 3TB internal HDD for CCTV recordings for my VMS No.4 - 10-14TB HDD for storage of movies, tv shows, etc. (or as the parity disk for RAID 5) After this my motherboard is out of SATA ports on it so I was looking at something like this to expand the storage- DAS Now to my questions- 1. I currently have about 9TB of media files across drives 4,5 and 6. If I was to set up a RAID 5 adding just the parity disk would I lose the files on these drives and secondly would I actually gain any more space by only adding the one new drive and using that for parity? or would I need to add 2 larger drives? Ideally I'm trying to avoid having a massive cost to do it in one go and make something that can be upgraded as needed so it's not one big purchase. 2. If I was to not have a RAID setup and just add a 10TB HDD to get extra space for now and then add a second 10TB HDD in 6 months or so once that was starting to fill up can the RAID be set up then without losing all files? There's nothing that's going to be saved on any of these drives that can't be replaced. It will be an inconvenience but not the end of the world if a drive failed so I'm not that worried about going 6 months or so without the redundancy. 3. Is there any limitations of using external DAS enclosures with unraid? I was thinking about keeping the parity drive in the actual computer itself so that all of those ones are just storage but any input on this is appreciated. 4. I have seen that a cache drive is recommended. Is this needed for this setup and if so how big does it need to be and does it need to be a dedicated drive? This server is pretty much just to hold video files for plex. Max that might be being read is 1x 60Mbps file and on rare occasions maybe an additional 5Mbps file at the same time. Also if it is required where would you install it? I could move the CCTV drive to the DAS but ideally I would like that connected directly to the PC for less things to fail and also the constant writing may interfere over the single USB connection if i'm watching a large files while trying to copy some other files. 5. Has anyone got any experience on running multiple virtual windows 10 OS's. I would ideally like one that just does uTorrent with my VPN and then a second one that runs plex, my CCTV and any other things that I want to run on there. The system currently has 8 GB of RAM and an i7-2600. Will I have enough system resources to run 2 operating systems and unraid? Do I have to allocate a certain amount to each one or will the system automatically allocate what is required and share it between the two. Sorry about the essay of a post but any input is appreciated as I would like to have all the information required so that I can set up a system that can be easily expanded on in the future.