Setting up an array

[Nicolai]

Hello all of your wonderful people.

 

I'm "about" to pull the plug on making my only and primary PC an unraid machine with VMs and Dockers for my home entertainment and databank. Currently I'm in the process of learning and understanding arrays, how they work and what would be best for me.

 

First question and reasoning

I would prefer to eventually migrate and upgrade into an SSD based array, 2.5" SATA SSD array to be exact, due to both power use benefits and due to the increased performance over mechanical drives. However, I don't know if it's actually possible, as I've come across information stating it is possible and information stating it isn't possible. So that would be my first question, am I chasing a pipe dream here?

 

Second question and reasoning

Currently my "databank" consist of a couple of 1TB WD Green drives and a 500GB WD Green drive. I can understand this isn't ideal for a databank solution, which is part of the reason I want to upgrade. I am aware, that the first drive I buy will be used for parity data, and as such not provide any additional space or performance, but can it be an SSD in an array with mechanical drives? I'd prefer to do it this way, and in time replace the mechanical drives with an SSD, one by one, as I can afford them. I've had good experience with WD, and for that reason I'm planning on replacing with WD Red SA 500 NAS SATA SSDs, if this is a bad idea, let me know.

Edit: Noise and power consumption is also a concern, as I'll be having the machine located in my living room.

 

Third question and reasoning

Since I'll be running Windows 10 and/or 11 as my primary VM, I do want that to be on the NVMe SSD already install in my system, for the best performance for when I play videogames. I understand, it's possible to create back files of your VMs, would that also be the case for one located and installed on an SSD in this fashion? The reason for this question is, if that's the case I was going to create a fresh install, and once the configuration and personalization is completed, I would create a backup, so if anything goes bad or when performance drops due to windows trash files, I could just replace and be back running in no time, thus avoid making another install, setup and personalization.

 

 

Thank you all in advance, both for reading and possible answers.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Nicolai