direct connections and recommendations

Longtime lurker first time poster. 

I am a designer at a museum and generate roughly 30gb of archivable data/year. Since our museum is partially funded by our municipality, most tech is overseen by the city IT dept. 30 staff members share 250GB of space which is backed up to LTO. I can't make use of this space as outside of the generated data, I work with a ton of large image and video resources as well as manage all our online properties. I rely on the mac platform for this work. I was backing up to a TB2 DAS by OWC that failed (drives are ok!) and the iMac it was attached too also died. I was forced into upgrading and was originally going to ditch mac, but with the PC market being what its been and the m1 being readily available and inexpensive for what it claimed to offer, I decided to go with a mac mini. I knew going into it that a number of the peripherals I rely on to do my job would become obsolete due to incompatible software. This includes the vinyl plotter I use to create all our in-house graphics with. Kind of a deal breaker, but whats a mans to do. Since I work outside the realm of what IT deems is appropriate network use, they sliced off a wifi network that I'm able to cause trouble on. 

I've been using Unraid at home for the last 6 or 7 years. Its been a dream platform for someone like me who needs a bit more control and customization, and works across multiple fields. I've had 0 issues with it and realized it could be the perfect buffer between software heaven and hell at work. I came across the U-Nas enclosures and thought I could repurpose some other hardware into the perfect 8-bay desktop NAS. I could run VMs for old operating systems that would hopefully allow access to USB peripherals, dockers for web-dev work, and I'd have a key storage issue addressed. In an ideal world it would direct connect to the mac through TB4.  I've read through all the forum posts regarding direct connection through thunderbolt and its obviously not an option. OK. Since the network I connect to is heavily managed, requesting port access for an Unraid server would likely be futile (bureaucracy), or at least better done after its on site and part of a workflow.

My noob questions: 

Can you direct connect to unraid or is a managed connection required? 

What would be the speediest direct connection between a TB/USB4/1GBE equipped m1 mac and an i5-8500/USB3.2/1GBE Unraid outside of a network? Are there better alternatives to something like a UNAS?

thanks