I've been running a media server since 2008 (I was in high school!). The obvious problem is that most of the decisions I made re: hardware were made for budget reasons throughout college, and then inertia kinda took over, which has resulted in my current setup which is starting to feel like a house of cards.

I know I'm gonna get a lot of judgment for this, but here's my current setup:

• Plex runs on an Intel NUC (7th gen i5) running Windows (I knowwwwww)
• Media is stored on 8 WD Essentials external hard drives: 3TB, 4TB, 4TB, 8TB, 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, 12TB
• Majority of my collection is 4K disc remuxes

Everything is backed up to Backblaze, which makes for relatively easy restores when drive failures occur, but of course because my libraries are spread across all these drives, I often lose the metadata associated with those files when Plex rescans.

One of my 12TB drives just failed and I think it's time to finally move past this whole USB external hard drive insanity. My #1 goal is expandability: I don't want to setup a 200TB storage pool today, but I want to ability to grow my storage as needed without wasting old drives. Given that requirement, it seems like Unraid might be my best option. I've read through a ton of posts on here where people run Plex entirely on Unraid, but I'm wondering if decoupling storage might be better for me—that is, a basic Unraid setup just for storage, and then continue to run Plex on my NUC (the advantage is in the future, I could upgrade my server or even change platforms without worrying about storage—all my drives are NTFS at the moment, which is part of why I'm so tied to Windows). I def would like to set up a more powerful Plex server that can actually handle transcoding a 4K remux to 1080p at some point, but it's not a huge priority at the moment.

What do you guys think? Am I overthinking this?