Thats what I did when win 7 support was ending, been very happy and there's no way I'm going back to Windows.
tomten
Nope, you have to do the bypass
2.5" disks are SMR, you don't want that in a raid.
Unless you have use case for that much horsepower I would suggest, like others here, buy a mini PC as a start and if you need more down the line buy a second one. They are cheap, fairly quiet and don't use much power.
No not really, even with a couple of hundred employees it would be a lot for that.
Does zoom do a ton more than the meeting app since they have 7500 employees?
It's called power supply idle control, worth a test.
There is an issue with ryzen and certain PSUs that when it goes to idle it pulls so little power that the psu thinks it's off and kills the power, it can appear as a hang. there should be an option in the bios to change it to "typical power" or named something similar.
I use Alpine Linux for all my dockers, small and fast.