Hi,

 

   New user from the NJ area.  Dont judge me I moved here cause my wife has a business.  Its not that bad, kind of a suburb of Philadelphia.  Anyways, I have a Plex server that has grown out of control.  I was thinking of just purchasing a QNAP but a guy I work with said I should get an older device and use unraid.  Ironically by day I support a VMware infrastructure with NetApp, Cisco and soon Pure storage.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars of storage I dont have to pay for.  Now that I have to pay for it I am shopping around.  Right now I have one 3.5 inch 18 TB drive that is close to full.  I was thinking of a 4-8 bay device populated with 10 Tb drives.  What gets me is the many types of enclosures that are available.  Any links or ideas would be great.  Buy a Qnap and install unraid?  Is it really that easy?  I will be researching myself as well.  Thanks.

 

Mike 

Any computer will work with unRAID.  Find an old computer or build a new one.  It's up to you.  My test server is an old Windows desktop that I repurposed.  The beauty of it is that you don't need the same size drives, mix and match as you see fit.  Right now I see that the 14TB drives are the best price.  Grab a few of those.  If you decide to build a new system then consider the following:

• Size the case for future expansion.  Typical full tower cases will fit about nine drives.  You might need something fancier if you want to go bigger.
• Make sure the mobo has at least two M2 slots.  Those work well for cache drives.