u/SFX200

Noob here so bear with me.

I'm building a NAS over the course of the next few weeks and with the prices on hardware being sky high right now, I'm limited in what I can do.

This NAS project has 3 main goals:

1. General NAS storage for my digital art files and RAWs - used at home locally 95% of the time
2. Media server that has an easy enough interface that my non-technical wife can use it without me being around
3. Immich server for both of our photo catalogs
4. Pi-Hole

Hardware I have gathered so far:
Silverstone HTPC Case that holds 6x 3.5" drives
PSU
ASUS B450 Motherboard with Ryzen 5500
2x 16GB of RAM from an older build
TP-Link 2.5GBe card
Blu-Ray drive

Hardware that will be gotten soon:
I have a source that has several 4TB drives. I plan to fill all 6 slots with them.
GTX 1650 from a friend

Being pretty unfamiliar with unRAID, I'm not sure about a few things.

1. I realized my motherboard only has 4x SATA ports. Is it ok to mix on board SATA ports and PCIe card SATA ports?

2. What easy to use HTPC software is out there that works with an IR remote? I have an extra Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard, but she'd prefer a TV remote.

3. I've read some things about cache. I was thinking of running unRAID from a 1TB NVMe in an older build and dedicating most of that to cache. I'm thinking this would be useful for my larger digital art files where some of them can be 1GB+.
Going back to point 1, if I use a combination of on board SATA and PCIe SATA adapters, should I just use a small 256GB SATA SSD for the OS and use the full 1TB for cache?

4. I have a USB 12TB drive. Can I plug that into the back of the unRAID and use it as an automatic backup?

Thanks in advance

I'm a U.S. based returning student in my mid-30s. I'm a self-taught visual artist and have had a decent amount of success with getting my work into galleries and museum exhibitions.

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Since returning to community college the past year, I've had 4 out of 4 of my art professors what my next steps are and if I have considered or are planning on teaching in some capacity. This is something I'm very interested in and I've been told by my peers and professors that I am quite adept at helping others in my classes.

In my most recent darkroom class, my peers regularly asked for my help and my professor pulled me aside a couple times to look at other student's work to give my opinion on them.

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Art and art making is my special interest and in terms of academics is all I've ever excelled at.

That being said I still have classic Autistic and ADHD ways of communicating which I feel are problematic when teaching.

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Has anyone here worked their way through to teaching in higher education and how did you do it?

A couple childhood friends and I are looking at casual pickup and play online Switch games that we can play a couple times a week.

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I'm the "dad" of our Nintendo Switch Family account and we've had fun with the retro titles on there, but we're looking at some cheap eShop/used cartridge games.

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We would occasionally like to include other members of our families to play with us locally so if there is a split screen online options like Mario Kart 8's 2-player Online mode, that would be great.

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To break it down:

3 players if it's just the boys playing

Up to 6 if we include our families

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Thanks