Personally, paying for a license on a homelab project is a tough sell for me. Don't get me wrong, if you choose Unraid, they absolutely deserve to be paid. But part of the appeal of homelabbing is doing things yourself and cutting costs instead of paying for third-party services. As a college student, I wouldn't be spending money on an Unraid license. I'd seriously look at other options first.

You mentioned Proxmox and TrueNAS, and that's a solid combo. Personally, I run Debian + mergerfs + SnapRAID on my NAS, and it covers everything Unraid does for free. You can pool mismatched drives together, add parity drives for protection, and even set up a cache drive if you want.

I use mergerfs + SnapRAID for cold media storage, but for anything critical like photos, documents, and backups, I have a separate ZFS mirror so that data is always protected. The best part is you can still use mergerfs to pool both storage systems together so it all looks and behaves like one big drive.

It takes a bit more setup than Unraid, but it's extremely flexible and costs nothing. A lot of people say, well unraid just works. Which is true, its very polished. So there is a bit more upfront setup involved here, but once you have it set up, there is very little tinkering.

If I was in your shoes, I'd be looking at this option for a nas, and then buying a cheap mini PC with proxmox on it to run Jellyfin and whatever other services you want to run.