I'm looking to buy unraid soon and either get the basic or the plus license and need help deciding between the two. My main question is what drives count toward your total, if I have two ssd's as a cache will those count towards my total. If I got basic would I top out at 4 hdd's with 2 ssd's as a cache, or would I be able to connect up to 6 hdd's even with 2 ssd's as a cache, and if so how many drives could I have in the cache pool

any attached storage devices count towards the licensed limit, regardless of whether or not they are assigned to the array, cache, parity, or left unassigned.

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Can you attach USB hard drives NTFS to transfer data hopefully at a faster rate than using the network share? Would these temporary drives also count toward your license total?

3 minutes ago, Jim1234 said:

Can you attach USB hard drives NTFS to transfer data hopefully at a faster rate than using the network share? Would these temporary drives also count toward your license total?

They do not count as long as they are not plugged at the point where the array starts.  If they are plugged in at that point they DO count.    Once the array is started then removable drives can be plugged in without problems (at least until the next array start).
 

In practice many people like to have a licence level which means they can leave such drives plugged in as it is more convenient to not to have to unplug them to be able to start the array, but it is up to the user to make a decision on this.