well on unRaid you just click add a pool and you select which drives you want in it, then you just tell your shares to use that pool

I saw a post earlier on how someone was using the free hosting in Oracle to run their instance, I made an account but haven’t gotten it setup

It works great I keep my containers in the cache so they operate faster, and when moving files to my server it gets placed on the cache initially so the transfer is quick, then later it will migrate into the slower hard drives on it’s own time

I upgraded my gaming machine and used my old motherboard and cpu and loaded unraid on there, the i7 was great for plex transcoding and eventually i ran out of sata ports on my machine so I stuck a sata expander card in my one pcie slot, luckily the motherboard had two m.2 slots so I used that for cache. the case I used was a node304 and over time I added drives as I was running out of space. eventually I build a separate JBOD chassis to hold more drives