I've been looking into unraid but i know that windows can do RAID basically i am in the build process of a 12 bay PC full of hard drives in RAID for my personal backup with varying hard drive sizes with redundancy.
Can windows do that or do you need windows server? or is it to costly with windows, i never hear much about windows and RAID.
About half an answer, Yes, but don't know how involved one can get. I had to reinstall Win10 Pro Insider Preview and it picked up the AHCI/RAID setting in the BIOS. I had two smallish HDDs in the computer and later decided to remove D:, computer wouldn't boot to C:, I had broken the RAID by removal of that drive, had to reinstall again.
Does the motherboard have sufficient internal SATA connections or will External drives be needed? If only for backup have you looked into getting NAS drives and using Ethernet connection to your Router? I have 2 NAS drives that way and any computer that has Wireless/Wi-Fi connection can have the Public folder on each Mapped for storage use and access to the folders and files in it.
Most Routers will have 4 Ethernet ports and with my setup I had to add an 8-port Switch, both are Gigabit.
MB has 6 sata ports plus a sata card gives me 12 sata ports.
I likes to use smaller TB hard drives since they are cheaper.
There are many kinds of raid. Hardware raid is the fastest and most efficient, but typically has restrictions such as all drives have to be on the same controller. Software raid is more flexible, and can work across controllers, but often has a pretty big performance hit.
There are many raid levels, such as raid 0, 1, 5, 10... which you want is important. Also, hardware raid often requires all disks to be of similar capacity.
I have seen that video. :)
What i wonder is can windows do the same thing?
For RAID i've been using RAID 6 for it's 2 HDD redundancy on a synology NAS that i have out grown. I was going to buy a larger synology but i can build my own for far less money and have way more power for plex when it is needed.
Using Storage Spaces technology, one can create Dual Parity (RAID6) virtual disks. Warning: Administering, monitoring and repairing Storage Spaces are not tasks for beginners; using Powershell commands is necessary.
Check this out:
My 'New' Build!
I think you would find FreeNAS to be much more flexible than Windows. I am also running Plex server in a jail under FreeNAS. The ZFS file system used by FreeNAS is absolutely incredible.
Right now my system is running 2 3TB vdevs striped for a total capacity of 6 TB. The vdevs (virtual devices) each consist of 2 3TB hard drives in a mirrored array (think of 2 separate RAID 0 arrays running as a single RAID 1 array). There is a fifth 3 TB hard drive installed as a spare. If ZFS detects a corruption on any one of the single hard drives in the storage pool, it will automatically swap in the spare hard drive and re-mirror it.
I can expand at any time by adding more vdevs to the striped array, or by swapping out the 3TB hard drives for larger hard drives. I've also disabled power saving spin down on the drives so they are constantly spinning as hard drives wear out much faster from on-off cycles rather than just spinning. My Plex server is running off a 256GB SSD and I also run a Linux Mint virtual machine just to play around with - don't really do much with it.
I was trying to find a way to only have one PC on all the time instead of two.
I have weather and IP camera software that runs 24/7 that only works on windows.
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