Unraid build Guidance

[creatine]

After recently suffering a hard drive failure in my HTPC, I decided to look for a more robust solution for my media storage.  The hard drive failure was sudden, SMART monitoring did not detect any issues allowing me to take action.  Fortunately I "only" lost 2TB worth of media. My current HTPC has 8 drives of various sizes for a total of 30TB of data.  It is directly connected to my TV, runs Windows 10, Media portal with a dedicated GPU \ MadVR for 4K upscaling and HDR pixel mapping.  It also runs jellyfin so that I can stream movies to any other device in the home.

 

Coming from an IT background, I am familiar with building systems, storage, etc but less familiar with *nix side of things.  I am familiarizing myself with all the things UNRAID can do besides NAS storage.  Based on my HTPC config and requirements, can I replace it with an UNRAID system or should I continue to use a dedicated HTPC and build a dedicated UNRAID NAS instead ? 

 

Can you suggest an UNRAID build that will allow me to scale past 8 hard drives (ideally 12+) that will keep costs low ?  I am in an apartment so do not have space for a server rack \ chassis.

 

I notice there are several "plugins" that can be installed, can you recommend those that are considered a "must have" ?

 

Thanks.

[trurl]

23 minutes ago, creatine said:

Based on my HTPC config and requirements, can I replace it with an UNRAID system or should I continue to use a dedicated HTPC and build a dedicated UNRAID NAS instead ? 

You would have to run a VM (probably Windows) on Unraid to get the "client" side of things for HTPC, since Unraid itself is a "server". For example, you can install Plex Media Server as a docker on Unraid, and it will serve media to any of your Plex clients, but Unraid itself can't be a Plex client (player).

 

26 minutes ago, creatine said:

I notice there are several "plugins" that can be installed, can you recommend those that are considered a "must have" ?

The first plugin to be installed is Community Applications, which will give you an Apps page in the Unraid webUI to choose and install the hundreds of dockers and plugins available:

 

https://unraid.net/community/apps

 

Unassigned Devices plugin is very useful for working with disks that are not part of the array or pools, or on the network.