Hi there,
I recently upgraded my PC so I have a backup PC just sitting downstairs, currently using it as a 24/7 server for certain things I have running but it doesn't need the total specs that I currently have (4770k OC to 4.2, 16gb ddr3 ram, 1tb SSD)
I currently have a 2tb m2 for games and boot stuff, and a 4tb sata ssd that I use for media storage (basically only 4k movies to ~50-70 GB per movie) and it gets filled up rather quick. Rather than constantly deleting stuff, I would prefer to get a NAS going and just have more space that way. I don't want to get something like a synology since I think the specs vs the price isn't really worth it.
I was looking into unraid and thinking I could divide my resources up 50/50, so 2 cores/4threads and 8gb ram for the media storage NAS and 2cores/4threads and 8gb ram for the mini server (currently it's running the one program that I need it to run 24/7 and it only uses ~25% max on cpu and ram so I figure it should be good.
I was looking into Unraid because I remember the video where they did NAS + gaming PC and they used unraid for that.
Just had a few questions if you guys could help me out.
I saw in other videos some people get dedicated raid controllers (something like https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01M2AC40Y/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=AE2OZG2NN3099&psc=1), do I NEED to have one? The plan is to just have 5 drives with 1 drive redundancy, and then use the 1tb SSD as cache and just keep 100-200gb of it for the windows VM
For the windows VM, do I need to have a GPU for it to work? I don't plan to access it much via the monitor itself, mostly just via RDP. I can always pick up a cheap GPU but thought I'd check
In the future, if I want to upgrade the storage from say 8TB drives to 12TB drives, can I do that without losing the data? As far as I understand, I should be able to replace one drive at a time and rebuild everything onto 5 new drives
Any other tips or suggestions? I'd tried to read up as much as I could just want to know anything I should know before I drop a lot of money on drives and unraid itself
Thanks for any help
