celegorm

So far so good!  I'm doing the parity calculation with SnapRAID now.    It's going slow but calculating that much parity data I wouldn't expect anything fast.  For the time being, I disabled the data balancing as I cared more about getting a parity created than balance.  but I might turn that back on later.  worst case a drive dies before the next snapshot and things are restored how they were before the balance.
 
My initial thoughts so far are "wow".  super simple to set up and integrates very nicely.  My only complaint is that now "My Computer" is now littered with extra drives and drive letters that I don't need since I'll be doing everything in the pool.  That said, if that's my only complaint then I'm still in a much better position than I was before.
 
At this point I'm fairly confident that I will be buying once my trial is up.  I was talking to one of my friends who went the "UnRAID" route and with some of the things i've told him, he's regretted not trying this first.
 
Thanks again to all of you who answered my noobish questions and linked to the articles I couldn't find.  The prompt feedback was greatly appreciated and the activity within this community was a huge factory in me trying out the software.

Awesome, well thank you everyone!  I'm pretty impressed so far with just the level of feedback from people here.  I'm going to have to switch things over later today and give this a play.