Long time lurker, first time poster. Thanks for all the valuable info that has been shared here by this community! Incoming wall of text, but after a week of research and running through things in my mind all day I figured I would just ask the questions I have rather than make multiple posts as I imagine there are others looking to accomplish the same/similar thing right now. Thanks in advance!!

As I assume most of you are aware, the recent announcements from Plex and Synology are strong indicators of the writing that has been on the wall for some time. I’ve admittedly put off making any switch because things have been working just fine, but I’ve decided I’d rather just make the move now before even more changes happen, and while things like hard drives/NAS’ are still reasonably priced.

Background - I first got into the idea of self hosting when I picked up my first NAS circa 2020. It’s a Synology DS420j - about as entry level as you can get for a 4 bay NAS. I had big aspirations to really get into self hosting at that time, but for a variety of reasons (including the fact that its hard to flex the muscles of a Realtek RTD1296 SoC with 1 GB of RAM) once I got basic backups running and Plex was all set up, I didn’t do much else with the NAS aside from basic file sharing and messing around with some of the apps in Package Center to continue my learning. Well, there’s no time like the present for change and now is that time for me.

I currently have 2x 6TB + 1x 8 TB HDDs (all Ironwolves) in Synology Hybrid Raid (SRH) - with the 4th bay populated with an SSD that the Plex install lives on. I have an additional 8 TB drive at the ready as a hotswap and/or to add to my SRH pool once I upgraded my NAS. I’ve also finally hit 95% of my ~10.5TB pool (mostly Plex media), so this change comes at a somewhat convenient/necessary time anyway. [I plan to repurpose this NAS to be a backup only storage device so I can keep using Hyper Backup]

Current Plan/Quandaries -

1. New NAS - I intend to bump up to a 6-bay and while all of the big names have comparable 6 bays options (QNAP, Ausustor, TerraMax, UGreen, etc), but one of the more compelling machines I have found is the ZimaCube Pro. It’s a pretty massive upgrade from what I have, which is exciting, but I’d like to do a little future proofing with this upgrade and I do plan to start leveraging a lot more services including virtualization to take advantage of the power boost. From my research, it seems like there were some bumps initially when the cube was first released (pretty expected from a kickstarter campaign of this magnitude), including an issue with Ironwolf drives, specifically, getting fried. It looks like things are in a much better place now that we are approaching a year since release, but I would be curious if anyone is using the ZimaCube and has any feedback on it, or if there are other solutions I may not be privy to that people recommend. (Of note, I am perfectly aware and capable of building my own, but for this step in my self hosting learning cycle I’d rather just get something premade)

https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimacube-pro-personal-cloud?variant=47720546697508

2. RAID configuration - Obviously, SRH configured drives are not going to be compatible with ZimaOS, or any other non Synology OS (though I don’t plan to use ZimaOS anyway). I had really like the concept of being flexible with drive size as your storage expanded and you were able to accumulate more drives. There are plenty of good reasons for needing to have the same size drives across an array, but it was still a nice feature that I’d like to continue to utilize if possible. Im thinking a RAIDZ1 config would be good to move to (ZFS is intriguing), but from what I can tell you can’t use non matching drive sizes. Am I just going to have to bite the bullet and get all new drives to populate the new NAS, or is there an option out there that I am not aware of? I plan to begin standardizing my drive size at something much larger as the smaller drives begin failing/getting cycled out, but it doesn’t seem like there is a great solution to have that flexibility outside of the Synology ecosystem. (I am going to have to get large drive to move all my files to anyway before reformatting the current SRH drives so this is already going to be pretty pricey of an upgrade move)
3. Operating System - TechHut actually has a really fun series he has been doing recently that is very much in line with what I am wanting to do - getting a new Server/NAS setup to move away from Synology/Plex - and I’ve been pulling some ideas from my project from that series. He’s running Proxmox as the hypervisor and TruNAS/Jellyfin inside of that. As I have never used any of these types of softwares I was just curious if there are any red flags with this configuration that I should be aware of before devoting the time to learns these systems - as a tech enthusiast I am well aware of the enormous learning spike between Synology/Plex type apps and self hosted ones like Promox/TruNAS, hence wanting to make sure there isn’t something stupid I’m missing prior to investing the time.

TechHut Series: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=meta-refresh&__goaway_id=b1b338f21a54a885a60db50c1395bbdb&v=qmSizZUbCOA

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmSizZUbCOA - if you are still using Youtube naked for some reason)

Once I get the initial NAS and media server migrations done, I am sure I will have more questions once I start getting things like the Arr suite, Docker, PiHole, KeyPass, etc., set up, but if you’ve made it this far and have any input/insight to provide to my queries I would be greatly appreciative! This community is awesome :)