Hello!  My story is long an boring, but I will try and do the "long story short version";

Back in 2014, I built a decent rig for Free NAS; my goal at the time was personal storage, Plex server, and small Minecraft server

LIAN LI PC-V354B

SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2

Rosewill Fortress 80 PLUS Platinum Certified -550w

Kingston -KVR16E11K4/32

8Gb Flashdrive - USB 2.0

6x WD - Red 3TB (raid6)

1x Samsung 120 SSD

 

I sucked at configuring my FreeNAS, I got the SMB share up and running within a day... but every time I want to charge or add, Plex or Minecraft server something it took me days to weeks of reading, posting and configuring... I thought being a Weekend IT warrior would be enough to learn but alas I got so frustrated I bought a QNAP 670 Pro. I moved my drives into that and converted my NAS rig to a personal PC. Did a few small upgrades over the years;

 

Added / changed to;

GIGABYTE-6UASL3

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti

2X SAMSUNG 512GB

 

With the current Qsnatch crisis in the Qnap community, (I was infected)... I am looking to move away from prebuilt back into my own rig. I am hoping Unraid will be a good fit for as a self proclaimed IT weekend warrior. 

 

At this point, I would like to use as many components as possible above, 6x Reds, case, PS etc.  BUT I would like to upgrade some things to improve my rig. Looking to improve my Plex experience, resurrect my Minecraft server idea again (no more then 5 players), NVR software and storage (Win10 VM?), and a Linux VM for my son to learn on. OH, and keep to budget of $500ca upgrading if possible.

 

 Any suggestions on upgrades would be most grateful… 

(and I apologise my first post is a long winded ask for help)

Is there is any data on these existing disks that you want to keep?

 

Unraid must format any disk it will use in the parity array or cache pool.

I have most cloud backed up, and recently bought a 8tb USB drive I am currently copy the remainder of data.  I’ll be good to wipe and reinstall in a day or two once everything is copied.  

For your son learning, you could try turn QNAP 670 Pro to run Unraid OS instead QTS. ( Unplug DOM, just keep it and return to QTS anytime )

It would not have room for a cache drive, and that seems necessary for a decent Plex experience.