Hi everyone!

I’ve been a Mac and PC user for over 20 years, but I am brand new to the NAS world. I’m planning my move to a centralized home/studio storage setup and wanted to get some community feedback on my proposed layout, app choices, and beginner tips before setting everything up.

My Hardware Specs

• NAS Hardware: Aoostar WTR Max

• RAM: 16GB DDR5 RAM

• HDDs: 5x 12TB HDDs

• SSDs: 4x 1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs

Use Cases & Workloads

1. Active Editing (Mac & PC): Photo editing (Photoshop) and 4K video editing (Final Cut Pro). Direct library editing across network shares.

2. Media Server: Running Plex for about 5 active family/client users.

3. Backups: Centralized backup target for 5 machines total (3 Windows PCs and 2 Macs using Time Machine).

Proposed Storage Configuration

• Main Hard Drive Array: 5x 12TB HDDs with 1 Parity Disk (48TB usable space) for bulk storage and media archiving.

• NVMe SSDs #1 & #2: Configured as a Write/Read Cache Pool for array ingest and system files (appdata, Docker containers).

• NVMe SSDs #3 & #4: Configured as a separate fast NVMe Storage Pool (e.g., Mirrored) dedicated specifically for active Final Cut Pro and Photoshop scratch/project files.

Questions for the Community

1. Storage Layout: Does this split between Array, Cache Pool, and dedicated NVMe pool make sense for my workflow, or is there a better way to structure 4x 1TB NVMe drives on UnRAID?

2. Final Cut Pro over SMB: Are there specific SMB settings or plugins (e.g., Apple SMB fruit extensions) I need to enable for Final Cut Pro libraries to work reliably over the network without file locking issues?

3. Apps & Plugins: Which Docker containers or plugins would you consider "must-haves" for a setup like this (e.g., for Time Machine management, Plex, PC backup tools)?

4. Hardware & RAM: Is 16GB DDR5 memory sufficient to start with for Plex + Cache + video editing, or should upgrading to 32GB/64GB be my immediate priority?

5. Tips & Pitfalls: Any beginner tips or pitfalls to keep in mind for a first-time UnRAID user?

Excited to join the community and hear your thoughts! Thanks in advance!

1. Storage layout makes perfect sense.

2. SMB should more/less generally just work out of the box. Refer to the unraid docs for more info on SMB shares.

3. Community apps does a pretty good job of "spotlighting" apps/plugins. Couple of my favorites are: Appdata backup, Auto Disk Unlock, GPU Stats, NUT for UPS, par2cron, tailscale, user scripts.

4. 16GB is fine since most of your work will be performed on another machine. Unraid doesn't really use a lot of RAM unless you run RAM heavy containers.

5. A pitfall of your system is it does not have an intel iGPU and AMD is basically "not supported" by plex for hardware transcoding, so you likely wont see any benefit from that.

6. Plan if you want to encrypt your disks ahead of time. Doing it after the fact will not be fun as there is no way to "encrypt in place" and requires a disk format.

2 hours ago, MowMdown said:

A pitfall of your system is it does not have an intel iGPU and AMD is basically "not supported" by plex for hardware transcoding, so you likely wont see any benefit from that.

Agreed. This should probably be a red line for the build. I do not see an available pcie port to add a small discreet intel gpu which could fix this deficiency.

You'll have a great time.

If the NVME drives are sharing bandwidth I'd consider simplifying a bit. Just put all in one raidz1 zpool for a total of 3TB instead of two mirrored 1TB. I'd also carve out 32G of the pool for boot drive. Also might make sense to make one of the 12TB disks a zpool as well for instant snapshotting/backup of nvme pool.

Think of it as two constructs:

• "Production": 3 TB zpool (boot/cache/scratch). Backed up to 12 TB zpool

• "Storage": 36 TB Unraid array (1 parity)

Thanks for the incredibly prompt reply chaps - genuinely appreciate the thoughtful replies and you are a credit to the community!

You might also consider running two of the SSD's striped with regular backups to the aforementioned 12TB. That would be excellent for your active editing. Not that I know much about editing, but that'e what I've done for my VMs

Further, if you are keeping the system in your office, I'd recommend Coolercontrol (Docker) to let you adjust cooling and sound.