Is using Unraid my best solution?

[OP_POP]

Hi there,

 

Before purchasing / trying unraid, I want to make sure it is the right choice for me. 

 

I have around 40 hard drives (around 300TB), and running Drive Bender for pooling my hdds along with Mediasonic jbods on windows 11. Half of the drives are basically only on for manual complete back up, the rest are always running. These drives have different sizes, from 3TB to 18TB. 

 

Each time i run out of storage, I need to buy another mediasonic 8 bay enclosure, the usb is not fast enough, and manual back up is not efficient. 

 

So I heard about unraid and researched a bit about it. Can unraid make my set up more efficient while providing the piece of mind about my data? Can unraid handle all / most of these drives? If so should I still use external usb enclosure? Should i use unraid just as a file server and run my windows to transcode videos for editing and my Plex, or install everything as VM on unraid? What other hardware do you recommend I need?

 

Sorry for the newbie questions, but any help / article / video guidance that you think is appropriate for my setup is highly appreciated.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, OP_POP said:

should I still use external usb enclosure?

Definitely not 

[whipdancer]

2 hours ago, OP_POP said:

Sorry for the newbie questions, but any help / article / video guidance that you think is appropriate for my setup is highly appreciated.

Read the FAQ - it covers a lot of what you asked.

You can also get a lot of info from this playlist on youtube.