Hey guys,

After overthinking for way too long about this, I've pulled the trigger. Bought a Ugreen DXP 4800 Plus, a 2TB WD Red SN700 NVME drive, a 20TB WD Gold HDD, and a 16GB stick of RAM (it's gotten crazy expensive!) to add to the unit's stock 8GB for 24GB total. I also bought a Transcend 16GB JetFlash 780 MLC USB drive (closest I could find to the "recommended" drives I saw online, many or most of which are no longer available for purchase).

Once prices level out, I'll replace the stock 8GB stick with a matching 16, for a total of 32GB. Still not sure what the smart thing to do is with the unit's built-in storage (where the stock OS is installed). I don't see myself ever using the stock OS, so it would be nice to repurpose that drive and not just keep it disabled forever.

As time goes by, I intend to purchase 3 more 20TB drives (one at a time), to keep one as a parity drive and use the rest for increased storage capacity.

So far I've nailed down my intended usecase to:

• Time Machine backups for our household's two Macbooks (512GB each)

• Running Scrypted to make my five Unifi Protect cameras visible to Apple Home

• Setting up the Servarr services for automated media downloads

• I've got a Proton VPN Plus subscription that I'd like to incorporate to the torrent client (Gluetun maybe? Or just via Unraid's VPN settings? Or directly in the qbittorrent client?)

• A Plex movie library which will be used 90% in the same local network (via Apple TV 4Ks), and very rarely at a vacation home where I've got an old Roku (which might require transcoding until I replace that streaming box for an ATV). I might try Jellyfin out, but it seems harder to configure remote playback there than it is with Plex (though on the plus side, I wouldn't have to pay for a Plex Pass).

But since this is my first time owning a NAS, using Docker, using Linux, and the whole rest of the homelab-lite universe, I wanted to check whether there's any other must-have services I should think about running (and which my admittedly basic hardware allows for).

Hope I'm posting in the right place; any feedback is welcome! Thanks in advance.

Your hardware and future plans all sound good. No need to go crazy. Gradually add what you can. That's the beauty of unRAID.

Everyone has a different idea about software but maybe the only "must need" thing is the "Appdata Backup". This backs up your docker containers. Also good to use Duplicati or Vorta to back up your data to another location.