Will I need to purchase a license? - Possibly use 4 drives

I plan on having a 5 tb Parity drive, and 2 separate drives w/ media possibly totaling 9 TB.  So this is 3 drives.

I read you want SAB/Sickbeard/addons/etc. Installed on another drive (is this called the cache drive)?.  So is sounds like I will need 4 drives,

So if I stick w/ v5.x, I'll need to shell out $69?

I plan on having a 5 tb Parity drive, and 2 separate drives w/ media possibly totaling 9 TB.  So this is 3 drives.

 

I read you want SAB/Sickbeard/addons/etc. Installed on another drive (is this called the cache drive)?.  So is sounds like I will need 4 drives,

So if I stick w/ v5.x, I'll need to shell out $69?

It is possible to mount drives outside of the protected array. and these don't count for licensing purposes, so you could go that way, sticking with v5.

However, a better option might be to purchase the new 'Basic' licence for V6 - this supports four array drives and is priced at an incredibly reasonable USD29.

You're correct.  The new $29 Basic license is not recognized in v5, so to get more than 3 drives you have to buy a Plus license.

I do not know for certain -- but I don't believe there's any plan to update v5 to recognize the Basic license, as it's effectively going to be obsolete once v6 final is released.

For what you plan to do, I'd just buy a Basic license and use v6.