Advice for migrating from Debian to Unraid — drive & pool configuration

Hi everyone,

I’m currently running Debian 12 on my home server, but I’m considering migrating to Unraid. I have also opened a thread on Reddit to compare different opinions, but I would like to hear directly from the Unraid community as well.

Hardware:

• Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX B760-G GAMING WIFI

• CPU: Intel Core i5-14500T (14 cores, 6P+8E)

• RAM: 64 GB DDR4

• Drives:

  • 1 × 10 TB SATA HDD → movies and TV series

  • 1 × 6 TB SATA HDD → movies and TV series

  • 1 × 4 TB SATA SSD → OS (Debian), Docker containers, metadata (Plex, Roon, etc.), JDownloader & qBittorrent downloads, plus some hot media I rewatch often

  • 2 × NVMe drives combined for music library (total capacity depending on pooling)

Current usage on Debian:

• The 10 TB and 6 TB HDDs are purely for storing movies and TV series.

• The 4 TB SSD hosts OS, Docker containers, all metadata, and downloads, plus some frequently watched films/series.

• The two NVMe drives are combined into a single volume for my music library.

• I do not need to back up movies, TV series, or music, as I have two separate NAS units (kept powered off most of the time) that I use only as backup for this media.

• My 64 GB of RAM is used for caching and temporary files (e.g., /tmp for Plex transcoding).

Looking for suggestions on:

1. Optimal pool/cache configuration to keep mechanical drives spun down when not in use.

2. Whether I should keep music on NVMe or move it to SSD and use NVMe for Docker/appdata and hot media.

3. How to handle backups of Docker containers and metadata in Unraid.

4. Best ways to leverage my 64 GB RAM effectively (ZRAM, tmpfs, etc.).

Thanks in advance for your advice!