Bloved Madman

Check out Spaceinvader One on YT, he alone is all you need when it comes to everything and anything unraid.

Its all consumer hardware but it’s a dedicated box running unraid.

• I3 12100
• 16GB DDR4 ram
• LSI raid card
• Case that allows for lots of 3.5inch drives

Ita easy to do in unraid, you set it up per share, so say you have a “media” share you can change the settings to include a cache drive and then set it to write to the cache drive first and then more to array. If you don’t have a cache drive or want to add a other you can do that by installing the ssd, booting up, stopping the array and adding in a new cache drive (you can add it to your existing cache pool to increase its size or create a new one and keep them separate for separate uses)

I use unraid with 5x8TB drives, 1tb ssd as a cache drive for new transfers (writing to an ssd is faster, it then moves to the array after) 500GB NVME drive for appdata and applications and a 250GB ssd for VMs and ISOs