In an effort to consolidate hardware and make gaming from my laptop a little bit easier and more convenient - and the fact that where I keep my hardware is now being turned into a nursey - I'm looking to potentially consolidate my gaming and unraid machines into one MEGASERVER. It's coming around the time for me to upgrade the drives in my server as well as break down my gaming rig and perform some watercooling maintenance, so I figured why not have the best of both worlds in one machine.

In my gaming machine, I'm running a core i9-9900k, 64GB of ram, a 512 NVME, and a 2080 super watercooled in a custom loop. In my server, I've got a 60tb array 20tb parity. I'd like to bring all of that together (including the watercooling) and set this up to handle both all my media gaming in a VM environment.

I'd be setting up another cache drive dedicated just to the VM (1-2tb NVME) and then the current drive array dedicated just to media / personal cloud stuff / backups as it's currently doing.

The games I run aren't really all that graphics intensive - Apex Legends, Modern Warfare / Warzone, Battlefield 1 and V, and ideally 2042 when it comes out. Am I setting myself up for disaster by trying to do this in a Windows 10/11 VM environment? I'm not looking for eye-watering performance, but getting above 60fps without much stuttering would be nice. I'd never really game outside of my home network, but it would be nice to sit in bed and do this with my headphones on and none of the crazy RGB from my desktop lighting up everything around me while the baby is asleep.

So my questions are:

How do I go about upgrading the drives themselves? I'd like to increase these from 10tb to 14 or 16tb drives. Do I replace all the drives at once and let the parity drives rebuild them? Or do I need to swap them in one at a time?

For the gaming machine, how do I know I'll be able to dedicate ram and CPU cores to it so my gaming experience is still more or less the same?

Should I be worried about trying to watercool this?

I should also add that nothing truly important is kept on here. I use tresorit for all important documents, photos, etc. This is purely a plex server (I like to have a lot of 4K content).

Is it overkill? Probably, but space is a premium here and the more I can keep in one box vs spreading it out to 2 would be awesome.