I have a PC that I built back in 2013, and it's been sitting idle for a while. I'm considering converting it into a NAS for digital media storage and Plex streaming instead of buying a prebuilt NAS. I'd like to digitize all my physical media, which means I'm looking at RAID 1 for redundancy and aiming for a total capacity of around 12-16 TB. I'm planning to budget about $400 for this project. Any suggestions on how to go about this?
1 Answer
RAID 1 isn't strictly necessary for NAS setups. You could set up a system with one parity drive instead—like using UnRAID. For example, if you get three 8TB drives, you can assign one as parity, giving you 16TB of usable space with some redundancy. Plus, you can easily add more drives later without having to buy mirrored sets every time! Just keep in mind that your largest drive would need to be the parity drive.
This is super helpful! I didn't realize that about drives in UnRAID. I’ll look into it—thanks!