Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren’t in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.

That’s pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.

I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid’s license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.

Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.

Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.