First, I would like to thank this community for being an understanding, open-minded and Novice friendly like myself. I have learned a lot in the past few weeks thanks to this community, unlike Reddit's toxic communities where asking a question is illegal.
I have built most of my NAS; the only missing component (CPU) I will be collecting in the morning. I just wanted to ask general questions or tips. Dos and Donts. I will be using Unraid as OS.
https://www.serverbuilds.net/ is a popular website online for folks building NASes at home. They’re fans of Unraid as well. They’ve got a Discord if you’re looking for something more interactive. Worth checking out. 👍
What OS are you planning on running? I personally use FreeNAS(TrueNAS) and largely love it. There's a steep initial learning curve, but it's not too high.
I run it in a VM inside of esxi so I don't need a lot of it's more advanced features. But I do have a jail with deluge in it to handle my torrents. Deluge isn't up to the task though so I may migrate to a separate VM with something else, or just make a new jail with a different client.
Here's my advice. The most important things are that you have a free GPU slot and another PCIE slot on whatever you get. You're going to want a GPU for transcoding when disk space gets tight. You want the extra PCIE slot for a sas card. Disk shelves are surprisingly cheap, and you can keep adding disk that way. They daisy chain.
As far as the OS, I'm partial to Unraid and Truenas but seriously, anything you are comfortable with will work.
I don’t use unraid by my advice for everyone is that you can’t have too many backups of data that you really care about, use the 3-2-1 rule at a minimum.
Also, welcome to your new hobby you will love and hate at the same time sometimes :D