Taking out drives for testing is a no-no unless you’re very careful.

If you hook up any drive to Windows it’ll write on it and thus your drives aren’t the same anymore. If you RAID controller (or software) doesn’t catch this you now have an inconsistent RAID config.

If there’s no (usable) iptable option you can always just route the IPs/subets to a non existing gateway.

Google ‘dual PSU adapter’.

There are two options:

1 - a 24 pin adapter that bridges the power-on pins to the other PSU

2 - a 24 pin adapter that takes a molex from the main PSU and uses a relay to power on the secondary PSU

Either works just fine.

Unraid does support unequally sized drives, your parity drive just needs to be as large as your largest drive. It’s not true mirroring of course.

The easiest setup would be to create two RAID1 sets, this also gives your the highest chance of recovering data in case one or more drives die.

You might want to consider a typical desktop/tower with a consumer CPU. The noise and heat from a simple desktop PC, even of you have the case filled with 10 drives, is so much less than a server chassis.